


Phobetor

by TheMagnificentKiwi



Series: A Long Way From Home [2]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil, Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Action, Angst, Angst and Romance, Body Horror, Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, Explicit Language, F/M, Fear, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Nightmares, Paranoia, Post-Resident Evil 3 Remake, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:54:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 87,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25361251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMagnificentKiwi/pseuds/TheMagnificentKiwi
Summary: Fear isn’t something that is inflicted upon us. It is born in the darkest corners of our own minds, and it is there that it will hold us prisoner, hand us matches and laugh as we set our entire world aflame for the promise of light.~~Reunited with her former teammates, Jill continues her crusade against Umbrella with Carlos at her side. But war is ever-changing and as demons crawl out of the past she learns that sometimes letting people in means letting them down or losing them completely.
Relationships: Carlos Oliveira & Jill Valentine, Carlos Oliveira/Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy/Claire Redfield
Series: A Long Way From Home [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1836568
Comments: 161
Kudos: 151





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve been working on this for well over a month now but it’s finally at a place where I feel comfortable posting the first chapter! The main idea of this story is pulled from an idea about 10 years in the making, evolving from a weird AU to something more canon compliant. This is set in the same timeline as A Long Way From Home just because I like my own circle of continuity but you by no means need to have read that. This…is likely to be on the darker side compared to that. Our heroes are still dealing with the psychological impact of their experiences and it’s going to show. Violence in later chapters & possible sexual content ahead.
> 
> I already have the first few chapters written but I’m aiming for weekly publishing and want to stay a few chapters ahead of myself. If you enjoy what you read please leave a comment and let me know – I always love hearing from you and I take all feedback into consideration so it’s a great way of letting me know what you are enjoying and what you aren’t liking so much.

**January 3 rd, 1999. Paris, France.**

She would miss Paris, Jill decided with more certainty than she had felt over anything in some time. It had been home for almost a month now and there were still things she longed to do, sights she longed to see, and boulangeries she longed to revisit until her favourite jeans fit a little more snugly around the hips.

But Paris was only ever a stepping stone, and though they hadn’t quite known where the next would appear she had faith that they would find it. As it transpired, Chris had already stumbled across it, before his untimely and unexplained departure. They had truly believed that they had been alone, that this war was one they would fight with sticks and stones. But in Chris’s prodding and prying he had stumbled across individuals hiding in the shadows, harbouring anger to rival their own. Scientists, disgraced after attempting to report breaches of ethics; workers unlucky enough to stumble across something that forced them on the run; family members who dug a little too deeply into the disappearance of a loved one. After Raccoon City the numbers had inflated, both from survivors and others whose eyes were opened. She knew better than to become complacent, but this had been far less of a struggle than she had anticipated and that had encouraged her to open herself up to things that may have otherwise been off the cards.

One of those things was the handholding she currently indulged in. Public displays of affection had never really been her thing, but she had complained about her lack of gloves in the cold January air, Carlos had pulled both her hands into his, kissed them, warmed them up, and then had retained one in a move she was surprised to find that she didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure if it was smooth or embarrassing but pushed it aside as one of those things she would figure out later.

They didn’t even know where they were going but that was part of the charm. With four people sharing a small apartment it tended to feel crowded and the journey into the city was easy enough. There was no evidence to suggest that Umbrella had cottoned on to their survival, and they were careful.

But maybe not careful enough…

She laughed at something he said, looked up at him and was momentarily taken aback when he brought their stroll to a stand to place a firm kiss on her lips. Seconds later, another landed on her cheek and then his lips drifted towards her ear.

“We’re being followed,” he whispered. “Act natural.”

“Asshole in the leather jacket? He’s been on us since Saint-Georges.”

Carlos pulled back and raised his eyebrows.

“And this is your way of acting natural?” she teased.

“Isn’t this the city of love?”

“Steady there, Romeo. Clock that alley.” She nodded to an entrance only a few metres from where they stood. “Pretend you’re saying goodbye.”

The thick eyebrows fell into a scowl.

“And leave you alone? This could be a trick.”

“I won’t go far in. If he doesn’t follow me I’ll grab him from behind – don’t worry, you’re safe with me.”

He kissed her, slow and sweet, more to shut her up than anything. When they parted she saw a moment of muted fear flicker across his face.

“You scream if you run into trouble,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Their mark was closing in now, weaving through the crowd. He wasn’t even trying to blend in anymore. That could only mean one thing – he’d seen their faces and at least one of them had matched up.

Jill was no stranger to this. She’d been followed plenty of times in Raccoon City, by marks who recognised her for the cop she was, by misguided or downright dangerous men. Of course, she had always been packing and that just wasn’t an option here in France, but she had taken down men twice her size before – this guy barely came to half the width Carlos did.

So, she left alone down the alleyway, making note of the doorways and windows, of environmental markers that may be of use to her if a struggle broke out, or even where potential ambushers could be hiding. Cop brain, she’d always jokingly called it. But it had always served her well. She wasn’t far past the first corner when she heard footsteps behind her, and a voice called out.

“Hey! Miss Valentine?”

Before she could address him or question why he knew her name, their pursuer was against a wall, the black blur that was Carlos moving fast enough that not even Jill saw him coming. The thud of the guy hitting the brick wall sent a chill through her, one that was urged lower by the anger on Carlos’s face, and the closeness with which he held a blade to his throat. For the first time, she saw an echo of who he was before they had met; before Umbrella, before his return to the States. This wasn’t a soldier; this was a man who knew that sometimes pre-emptive violence was the best, and only, defence.

“You feel that?” Carlos growled. “One wrong move and your day’s going south real quick. Comprenez-vous?”

Jill stepped closer, eyes on their quarry. He was younger than she had expected, perhaps about the same age as Chris’s younger sister. He was shitting himself too. Umbrella really must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel. It was almost insulting.

Carlos nodded to her and she began to pat him down, feeling along his belt, under his arms, and running her hands down his stiff jeans to the tops of his sneakers.

“Hey, man,” he said in a voice that didn’t tremble anywhere near as much as it should have. American, too – he was far from home. “I’m not looking to hurt you. I just need to talk to Jill, that’s all.”

Jill’s hands dipped into his pockets and found a wallet, a few American coins, sticks of chewing gum, a subway ticket and a small amount of detritus, but no weapons. She flipped open the wallet to find a few US dollars, a healthier amount of Francs and…

“How about you talk to me?” Carlos suggested. “Let’s start with your name and who sent you.”

“Leon Scott Kennedy,” Jill said, reading from his ID card. She flipped it around to show Carlos. “US government.”

Carlos looked closer at the card, maintaining his grip on their new friend.

“Think it’s fake?”

“If it is it’s the best I’ve ever seen. Say’s here you’re STRATCOM? That true? Why is STRATCOM looking for me?”

The US government was complicit in Umbrella’s wrongdoings, that much they knew. It was why they had not sought them out, why they had decided to take matters into their own hands. But they had seemed so set on burying the corporation in the courts – why were they after her? How did they even know she was alive?

“They’re not,” Leon said, his eyes on Carlos though he addressed her. “They know you survived Raccoon City but they’re keeping that quiet. They know Umbrella will go after you if they had any inkling of what you’re doing.”

“I suppose that’s supposed to be a benevolent action on their behalf, huh?” Carlos goaded.

Jill searched through the rest of Leon’s wallet, pulling out credit cards, loyalty cards and even a small strip of passport photographs, half of a larger piece that had been ripped down the middle. She flipped this over, and her fingers went numb.

“What’s this?” she asked. Carlos detected the tremor in her voice and pushed Leon further into the wall, hard enough that he grunted in pain.

Leon glanced over at the photographs and his expression softened. Whatever happened, whatever that look of regret, of shame, of humility did, it sucked the fear out of her like venom from a wound.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“Let him go,” Jill urged. “Put him down.”

Carlos looked between them, then moved his knife and slowly lowered him to a more comfortable position.

“What is it?”

She held up the photo strip now so that he could see it and noticed an email address scrawled on the back in familiar script.

“This is Claire Redfield,” she said. “Chris’s sister.”

Claire was tough, streetwise, and Chris had prepared her well to protect herself, both physically and mentally. So the comfort she showed with Leon in those frozen images spoke volumes.

“This is your cue to start talking,” she told him.

* * *

**January 14 th, 1999. Northern Spain.**

It was a cold night and they’d stoked the fire to its last embers. The warm light it cast over them all lulled Jill to a gentle sleep, but she fought it desperately. She had to stay awake, had to see this night through.

Carlos was already spark out next to her, but she remained in his arms, enjoying the comfort his warmth provided. He would wake soon, realise how intimately he held her and apologise profusely to the younger man sat opposite like he’d mortally offended him with the sight.

“You nervous?” Jill asked. Anything to maintain her tenuous grip on consciousness.

Leon smiled, and she got her answer.

“Haven’t spoken to her since we left Raccoon City,” he said. He leaned forward on the armchair, resting his elbows on his knees and moving his fingers in intermittent varying patterns. “I…feel guilty as hell for leaving her the way I did.”

“Way you explained it, you had no choice.”

Leon chuckled quietly.

“Maybe that was me trying to convince myself.”

Not even two weeks had passed since he had found them and he slotted in perfectly, like a cog in this flawed machine they didn’t even know was missing. At first she had written him off as being naïve and inexperienced, but soon realised that wires had become crossed somewhere. He had talked them through his experiences in Raccoon City, when Jill was fighting for her life and Carlos was running himself into exhaustion, about Claire and Sherry, and how the government had picked them all up, forced them into quarantine and made them an offer only he had accepted. His experience in the city hadn’t played out much differently than their own, but where she had stumbled out into a frightening new world that wanted to silence her, to invalidate her trauma like it was some pitiful psychosis, Leon had walked out into the protective arms of a government willing to train him and foot his therapy bill. He had apologised, many times, for the way they had met, had iterated that it had never crossed his mind just how on edge they would be. But his head was screwed on right and he was driven by the same force they all were. How rose-tinted his glasses were didn’t matter – perhaps it even helped.

“How about you?” he asked. “It’s been a while since you saw Chris.”

She had thought about this moment a lot since the day they’d found his apartment abandoned in a hurry. Some days she thought she would hug him like her life depended on it, others she felt a slap or a good old closed-fist greeting awaited him. Today, she just felt exhausted and wanted to smile at him, see that he was okay and then spend the rest of the night catching up like old times.

The sleeping man next to her should have been in bed hours ago, but he had refused, wanted to stay awake and be there when Barry returned. She wasn’t entirely sure how this reunion would go and, loathe as she was to admit it, she wondered if she wanted Carlos to see her as raw and exposed as she expected to be. It was the pull that still existed in whatever this was they had gotten themselves into. She shared an awful lot with him but there were still some things she needed to keep close to the chest.

Before she could answer Leon’s question, there was the scrape of a key in the front door. Carlos woke with a start and she pressed a hand to his thigh to reassure him. Muffled voices mingled in a cheerful chorus outside and Jill rose to her feet in anticipation. The door opened, Barry greeted them all with a grin…and then their eyes met.

Chris paused in the doorway, looking at her in mild disbelief.

She closed the distance between them in seconds and wrapped her arms around his neck. He looked the same as he did the day that he left Raccoon City. She didn’t know what she’d expected, like he’d come back less a limb or heavily scarred but seeing him as she remembered him brought forth a few silent tears.

“You really made it out,” he said, laughter colouring his words as he hugged her back in a crushing embrace. “God, Valentine, you had me worried.”

When she pulled back, she swiped at her damp cheeks with the cuff of her sweater and laughed with him.

“What, you think I can’t handle a few B.O.W.s?” she chuckled.

“It’s good to see you.”

There was so much she wanted to tell him, so much she needed to say. The Nemesis, Nicholai, the vaccine…all things they needed to unpack together, but tonight…maybe tonight was not the time. Tonight should be for the pleasantness, for the tears, for the joy of finally having all the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members back in one room.

Chris looked up, over her shoulder and an uneasy expression settled onto his tired features. It struck something within her, something unpleasant, but she shook it off and reached a hand behind her.

“I’d like you to meet someone,” she told him. His eyes were on a stranger in the room, and not the one currently hugging his sister. “Chris, this is Carlos Oliveira. He saved my life in Raccoon City, now he’s helping us here. Carlos, this is Chris Redfield, my old partner.”

Carlos stepped forward with a smile and held out his hand. Chris looked at it, looked back at her, then shook it with a degree of uncertainty.

“Nice to finally meet you,” he said. “Jill’s told me a lot about you.”

Jill felt Carlos’s hand brush briefly against her back, and she noticed Chris’s eyes follow the movement. The pressure in her gut blossomed.

“Barry may have mentioned you,” Chris said.

Shaking off the growing unpleasant feeling that had descended, Jill rolled her eyes.

“We have a lot to talk about,” she said. “It can wait ‘til morning if you need to rest?”

Chris eyed Carlos still and, to his credit, Carlos met his gaze unflinchingly. Both men were roughly the same height, but Carlos outstripped Chris in musculature – the elder man didn’t seem to intimidate her lover much, and she knew that Chris wasn’t the type to intimidate easily. For whatever reason, it appeared that she was witnessing a stalemate.

“You kidding?” Chris said, his usual boyish charm-sponsored smile returning. “When we’ve got this much catching up to do?”

Further reunions occurred, and Carlos’s introduction to Claire seemed to go a lot smoother, but Jill still couldn’t shake that horrible sense of foreboding. Drinks were cracked open, and then one by one they filtered to bed – Carlos first, followed by Barry, then Rebecca, Leon, Claire, and eventually only Jill and Chris remained.

They talked for two hours just on their own, and while the conversation began with painful reminiscence it soon turned to more modern matters with Jill, despite her previous reluctance, talking through her escape from Raccoon City in more detail than felt pleasant. Chris was rapt, taking in every word with an almost clinical diligence. He asked questions, poked at her story where her descriptions were lacking, and when she described her infection at the hands of the Nemesis, he had visibly drained of colour. When he asked to see her scar, he swore vehemently under his breath and a flurry of apologies followed – he never should have left her, should have come back at the first sign of trouble. He apologised for things she had held against him in her lonely anger, but those wounds were healed now

“I got out,” she explained after her story had wound to a close, when he seemed no closer to accepting that no apology was needed. “I’m alive, safe. Not infected.”

“Thanks to Carlos, huh?”

That coldness again. She had seen this coming though, hadn’t she? Chris Redfield, already a closed book, always expecting hurt, reluctant to trust. Then Wesker had happened – their Captain, their strong leader, leading them to their intended deaths. He didn’t trust anyone anymore. It would have broken her heart if it didn’t infuriate her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “I know because I’ve been there. But he saved my life. Again, and again. If he’s working against us, he’s doing a shitty job.”

“You ever think that could be their plan?” Chris asked. There was venom in his voice and though she wasn’t its intended target she felt it all the same. “Save one of us to get to all of us?”

Now it was her turn to feel anger.

“Fuck’s sake Chris. Give him a chance. He’ll prove you wrong, I’d stake my life on it.”

Silence. Uncomfortable silence.

“You’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?” she asked incredulously, her voice barely more than an angered whisper.

Chris opened his mouth to respond but seemed to decide against it and settled for a clenched fist.

“No,” Jill pressed. “I want to know. Because yes, I _am_ sleeping with him and I need to know now if you have a problem with that.”

He looked at her, his icy grey eyes cold and firm but hiding a pale cousin of fear.

“If I did, would it change anything?”

“You know damn well it wouldn’t.”

Chris sat up straight, raised a hand to the back of his neck and let out a breathy, exasperated laugh.

“You remember the aftermath?” she asked. She didn’t need to be more specific. “You remember how broken we were? RC was just as bad. It was nothing new to me but the nightmares it left me with… Carlos was seeing that shit for the first time. We were…lost. I don’t think either of us would have recovered so quickly if we hadn’t found each other.”

“Love through trauma?” Chris asked. He sounded sceptical. Jill shook her head.

“Not love,” she corrected. “We don’t have time for love, you know that. I…I don’t know what it is. But we care about each other. I care about him. And if you make this difficult for him, it’s us that are going to have the problem, Chris. You and I.”

He leaned back into the sofa cushions with a sigh. This wasn’t easy for him. Chris had a lot of pride and he was as stubborn as anything.

“He lost people too, you know,” she added. “Colleagues. Friends. Two of them died helping me. His trauma is no less valid than our own.”

Chris seemed to consider this, and she couldn’t tell what conclusion he reached. He looked over to the spot Carlos had vacated a couple hours ago and sighed. And that would be it. She had known him long enough to understand when he felt that he couldn’t win an argument so there was no point in continuing. He hadn’t changed his mind, but he knew exactly where this would end if he pursued it with her.

“He’s a hell of a soldier,” she added, for good measure. “Whatever I may or may not feel for him, we need someone like him. Umbrella isn’t going to go down quietly, you know that.”

She gave him a moment, let him stew in his own thoughts. He thumbed the neck of his empty bottle, wrinkled his nose and then looked up at her.

“It’s not just Umbrella anymore,” he said. Instinct was to argue, to think this was another dig at Carlos, but there was a deep fear in his voice that caged her in silence. “Wesker’s alive.”

_The clawed arm, stained red with the Captain’s blood, glistened in the shrill light that flashed above the tank that had contained it. Viscera clung to the bumps and notches, and those empty white eyes turned to its new prey._

“That’s…impossible,” she said, choking on her words. “We saw him. The tyrant, it-“

“I saw him. With my own eyes. Fought him. He’s…different now. He’s strong. Fast. More…more than I could handle on my own.”

Her breath left her in a short, airy puff. Every hair on her body stood on end. She wasn’t sure what she felt – fear, anger, resentment, grief. They all coalesced into something new and ugly, something that rendered her uncharacteristically speechless.

“He’s not with Umbrella anymore,” Chris continued. “I don’t know who but maybe it ties in with what that Nicholai asshole said.”

A sharp inhalation through her nose. A small, almost imperceptible shudder. That’s what it took to bring her close to her senses and even then her voice trembled as she spoke.

“We should have expected this,” she spat. “Should have known the vultures would descend. If the government turned a blind eye to Umbrella, it’s free fucking reign for everyone else too.”

She was angry at herself, she realised. For underestimating the situation, for believing that Umbrella was the end of all this.

A hand covered hers, warm and comforting.

“We’ll handle this,” he promised her. “Whatever it takes. We swore that, and I don’t know about you but I’m not letting that asshole knock us off course. We just need to be more focused, more careful.”

The next drink that flowed was whiskey, and she welcomed its slow burn cauterising every flayed nerve. They both needed it, both recognised that something in the air had changed. When they spoke again, the conversation turned to Paris, to the progress they had made in Chris’s absence, and Jill welcomed the distraction.

When she finally retreated to bed, Carlos was still awake but pretending hard not to be. She even made a show of unzipping her jeans and audibly de-clothing, but he remained stubborn in his ruse. When she slipped into the bed, however, and slid an arm around his waist, he was unable to maintain the façade.

Small, tender kisses along his shoulder drew a groan from deep in his chest and his hand found hers. Whatever funk remained ran off her at the feel of his rough yet gentle touch against her palm, but concern edged its way in, expanding to fill the empty spaces left behind.

“Still can’t sleep?” she whispered.

“I’ll be fine,” he promised.

“Nightmares again?”

He moved, and she shuffled out of the way of his shoulder as he turned to lay on his back, at an angle he could look her in the eye, caught somewhere between adoration and frustration.

“You going to try to reason with them again?” he asked.

“With who?”

“My demons.”

Running fingertips over her face, she sighed.

“I know I can’t,” she said. “But that doesn’t stop me worrying about you.”

Carlos looked up at the ceiling and laughed quietly.

“Two weeks ago, this was you,” he said. “We taking it in turns now?”

It wasn’t funny but she smiled.

“Until we don’t need to anymore.”

She moved closer to him, sliding her fingers over the hard muscles of his abdomen and resting her head on his chest. There, she felt him relax, felt the air leave his lungs as his heart beat a steady rhythm beneath her ear. Absent fingers traced a small circular scar on his left side and the movements of his chest slowed to a barely perceptible pace. When a soft snore escaped him, she closed her eyes, satisfied, and let the grim darkness of sleep consume her.


	2. Broken People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You think he’ll come after us?” she asked.  
> Chris looked up, looked at her. Then, he took one last drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out against the bin next to him.  
> “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it fucking terrifies me. I want him dead, but at what cost? What’s the point if we can’t protect the people we love?”  
> ~~  
> What’s dead should remain so, for the peace of the living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm not 100% happy with this chapter, but short of completely rewriting it (which I've already tried to do!) I feel it does it's job. It is a bit of a filler and I always feel anxious about those. However, the next chapter is almost completely done and is the most proud I've been of a chapter in a while sooo....if people are digging it I might get that one up ahead of schedule because I'm excited to share it :).
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who left a comment on chapter one :). I know the Valeveira content/fandom has died down a little now so it's great to see you all still around and supporting! I'm gonna start sounding like a broken record I guarantee, but it really does mean a lot! If you liked this chapter (or even if you didn't) please consider dropping a comment below with your thoughts - while the story is set they do help to shape the little details and let me know I'm on the right/wrong track :).

**January 15 th, 1999. 08:04.**

October 1st 1998 was a date that would stick in many minds for many years to come, but when Carlos Oliveira thought back to that day, his mind drifted not to the crater it had left in the middle of Ohio, but to the clothes he had peeled off his back and the shower he had stepped into in the late hours of the morning. Five days of wearing the same gear and pissing in whatever alleyway wasn’t likely to get your dick bitten off apparently made a good scrub his own personal nirvana. It was a momentous cleansing, sloughing away the events of the preceding days and uncovering the man that had left so eagerly on that transport into hell. As the warm water ran over his aching muscles the fatigue had finally caught up with him and he felt weak, both physically and mentally. It carved tracks in the dirt and blood that caked him and the rivulets that flowed into the drain were a murky shade of reddish brown.

It had been days before he truly felt clean again, longer before his anxiety fell low enough that he was able to accept the fact that maybe he _wasn’t_ infected. But in that moment, naked and stripped down to just his name and exhaustion, he had felt a strange sort of peace that would elude him in the coming days.

There, now, in the shower of their rented house in northern Spain, he shut the water off. Memories of the previous autumn had been returning in drips and drabs, reminding him that they were still relevant, that they weren’t going anywhere. It pissed him off. Because other things had happened since then, better things, yet his brain chose to recall the worst of them. There was no peace to accompany this shower, and the clarity of the water that dripped from him loaned no sense to that.

He toweled himself off with haste and wiped condensation away from the bathroom mirror. Some days, he barely recognised the person staring back at him. The scars from those dark September days and hollow nights had not yet faded – some he knew never would – and he still couldn’t recall how he had sustained most of them. Tiny little things, barely of any consequence given the stakes at the time. His hair, uncut despite Jill’s best attempts, was becoming an annoyance – if he could see it through until summer it would be gone, clipped short enough that he didn’t have to worry about it until the inevitable miraculous regrowth come winter. He had faced many battles in his short life, and he had learned long ago that the one with his hair was not one he would ever win, so he only entered skirmishes when he really had to.

After checking his beard – still an acceptable length – he changed into the fresh clothes he had prepared and gave his hair one last pass with the towel before kissing Jill softly and patting her backside firmly as they swapped out.

Barry’s snores still echoed down the hallway and faint music could be heard from Rebecca’s room as he made his way downstairs. When he emerged in the living room Leon was checking through his bag on the sofa, Claire was poring through a book at the kitchen island and Chris was swearing at lightly charred bacon by the stove.

“Morning,” Leon greeted. Claire echoed this without looking up, but Chris just continued to scowl down at his quarry.

“Mornin’,” Carlos yawned in reply. Yet again, the shower had failed to do its job.

A quick rifle through the cupboards returned a measly helping of coffee and he frowned at the grounds lightly coating the bottom of the bag. This wouldn’t help either. So, he reached for a bowl, poured in some cereal and milk and took a seat at the island.

For a long moment, he stared down into his bowl, shaking off the last remnants of sleep. He had been doing so well too…

“You look like you slept as well as I did,” Claire said, her own words stretched and muted.

He noted that the tome before her was in fact a textbook and raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t know,” he said with a soft laugh. “Don’t think I’d be able to study right now. Can’t have been that bad a night.”

Claire scowled, but it was aimed in Chris’s direction.

“This is part of the deal where I’m able to stay with him,” she explained. “Finish what college classes I can long-distance.”

“Sounds like a good deal to me.”

Claire sighed.

“It did to me, until I started trying to teach myself Spanish,” she said. “Maybe now we’re actually in Spain I can get a little practical experience, but I think this one’s a lost cause.”

She leaned back, almost far enough to tip the stool she sat on, and Carlos reached out with one hand to turn her notebook towards him. From what he could discern of her scrawled handwriting there were enough grammatical errors on the page that she was probably right.

“Sounds like you need a tutor,” he said.

“Like I can afford that,” she scoffed.

“I’m cheap,” he said. “Pay me in no sass and we’re good.”

It was Claire’s turn to raise an eyebrow now.

“You speak Spanish?”

“I’m Colombian,” he explained. “Growing up there would have been awkward if I didn’t.”

“Alright, how about no sass for no sass?” she said, clearly amused. Then, she tilted her head to the side thoughtfully. “Okay, maybe a little sass, and you teach me how to say some naughty things?”

“Claire, no!” Chris scolded. The stove was off now, and he was heaping what Carlos could only assume was over-cooked bacon between two split buns.

“You learn what you need to, and I’ll think about it,” Carlos agreed with a smirk. He’d already been trying to teach Jill bits and pieces – what was one more student? Besides, it gave him something to do. A distraction.

Chris placed a bacon bun in front of Claire and she observed it warily before peeling back the top piece of bread and inspecting what lay within.

“Really?” Chris said, wincing. Carlos wasn’t sure if he was joking or truly offended. “You not used to my cooking by now?”

“I did offer to cook,” Claire pointed out. “I also said cereal was fine. But you wanted bacon and you insisted.”

Chris grumbled, but Carlos saw a smile beneath it. They were close, that much was clear. Jill had told him all about them, of course, and she had hardly seemed surprised when they had found that frantic note from her former partner. _‘They have Claire. Rockfort Island – co-ordinates attached. I’m going after her. If I don’t make it, get her out of there. Please.’_ The apartment he had left behind looked like it had been ransacked, but Jill seemed sure that he had simply left in a hurry. Claire was the single most important thing in his life, she had said – the only thing that could have pulled him halfway across the world at a moment’s notice. It was why she had been content to let him and had immediately set about planning their next move, waiting for his return. They were just that in-tune. Looking at the man now that he was back, Carlos saw two people who couldn’t have been more different.

Claire, on the other hand… She was a smart kid with a smart mouth and no filter. He liked that.

“So, Carlos,” Claire said amidst a mouthful of bacon sandwich. “How’d you end up working for Umbrella?”

Chris had begun to raise a glass of orange juice to his lips but paused and set it back down when she asked this. Carlos looked into the bottom of his bowl but saw nothing but a thin layer of milk, no means of escape. When he looked up a flush had appeared on Claire’s cheeks and she swallowed hastily.

“I mean…Sorry. Really bad way of phrasing that. How did you come to- How-?”

“Why did I work for Umbrella?” Carlos finished. It was almost painful to watch her backpedal so hard the chain had worked its way loose, but at least it helped him find a smile that was close to genuine. She flashed him an apologetic look. “They offered me a lot of money and the chance to do some good. I’d not heard much about them, had no reason to suspect they were what they are. Then, they lied to us. Left us for dead.”

Umbrella had been a mistake, he knew that now. He was good at making those. Sticking with Jill, though, running off to Europe? So far, that seemed like a good call, possibly the best he’d ever made. Part of him was still waiting, reserved, expecting it to turn sour.

“You didn’t suspect, not even for a moment?”

It was Chris that spoke now, and Carlos looked up at him. He wasn’t addressing him, was just staring down at his plate.

“Never had the chance,” Carlos said. “Raccoon City was my first gig. Shit hit the fan shortly after we arrived; we were all focused on just staying alive. Jill tried to tell me, but I thought she was nuts. Then…well, turns out she was right.”

“She usually is,” Claire said with a warm smile.

There was movement across the island and Chris looked up now, looked at him with a fierce glint in his grey eyes. Carlos wasn’t intimidated, but it sent a shiver of something cold and unwelcome through him.

“And you just happened to find her?” he asked. “In the whole city, you just happened to stumble across Umbrella’s Public Enemy Number One?”

Carlos shrugged. It was too early and he felt too off-kilter to get into an argument, and Jill would be embarrassed if she found out it had started over her.

“I know. Lucky, right?”

A fist slammed against the table and their plates shook. Rubber feet squealed against tile as Chris pushed his weight against his stool and rose to his feet.

“What the hell, Chris?” Claire cried.

“Fuck this,” he growled, and then he was gone, leaving a half-eaten sandwich and barely touched glass of OJ behind.

Carlos felt winded, like he’d taken a punch to the gut. Claire offered no apology for her brother but looked awkward as hell. He was used to this; the mistrust. Back home, whenever he met someone new, someone who knew who he was and what he did for a living, they would eye him like a ticking time bomb. Even in his first days in the US, not sounding quite American enough and a little too brown to be trusted, he had attracted gazes that lingered too long and words he had learned quickly not to let cut through him. He was used to suspicion. While he used to enjoy it, would accept it as the armour it was in his later years in Colombia, here it felt like a burden. These were good people, people who meant a lot to Jill, people he didn’t want to let down. Umbrella was yet another stain on his life, one that was proving harder than expected to remove.

“Umbrella took a lot from him,” Claire said, softly. “I understand him not trusting you, but just…give him time.”

“Do you trust me?” he asked, unsure if he really wanted to know the answer.

“I don’t know,” she admitted with a half-hearted shrug. “But Jill trusts you for a reason, and I trust her. So that’s halfway there, right?”

* * *

**January 15 th, 1999. 12:00.**

She found him surrounded by a haze of smoke near a vending machine. It was funny how the acrid smell of tobacco always reminded her of him, wherever it reached her. The smokers in the S.T.A.R.S. team would partake freely in the office when she had first started, but one day Forest had found her ducked in an interrogation room with her work spread before her to avoid the stench and suddenly their habits changed. Considerate assholes that they were. True to past chivalry, Chris blew a plume of smoke away from her as she approached.

“I thought you were quitting?” Jill asked.

Chris smirked a lopsided smile.

“I’m trying,” he said. “But if I stop smoking, I start drinking, then I start smoking again. It’s a vicious cycle.”

With a roll of her eyes, she joined him in leaning against the wall to observe the passing crowds with indifference. They hadn’t ventured into the city since they had moved there, but now that they were all back together it seemed like a good idea to pass the time. Claire had found a vintage record store to get lost in with Rebecca in tow, Leon had already said his goodbyes and left for some work call at the US embassy in Madrid, and Barry had sought out a post office, dragging Carlos along as his translator. If she squinted just hard enough, she could almost convince herself that this was normality.

“Carla said they’re meeting on Monday,” Jill said. “I think they’ve found something worth looking into.”

Chris laughed bitterly and tapped ash from the end of his cigarette.

“And here was me hoping for a quiet week.”

Maybe it still would be. They were barely a ragtag group of survivors at this point, brought together by shared tragedy. Perhaps certain members did hold certain offices and perhaps with manipulation of those offices and certain licenses belonging to other certain members they were technically operating as a PMC, but it was all very much haphazard and completely unofficial. Even if they _had_ found something, there was no guarantee it would be something they could do anything about. And that’s what frustrated her. She was so used to being a cop, to having the full force of the RPD behind her - you found something, you went at it full-force with the resources and personnel to back you up. She didn’t like this slower pace, didn’t like sitting round waiting for something to happen.

And there was something else that bothered her now, something that had kept her awake much of the previous night.

“Do we need to shift our priorities?” she asked. “If Wesker… If he is physically enhanced in some way, he poses a real threat. Even without that… You know who he is. What he is. What he’s capable of.”

Anger. That’s what it was, she realised. That searing hatred inside of her, bubbling up like bile in the back of her throat. Nothing had been avenged – their progress was farther back than they thought. Nobody had paid for the crime committed upon them, and that poked at old wounds, tore some clean open. It felt cold at first, but now…now it burned.

“I get it,” Chris agreed. “I want to hunt the bastard down. But we don’t have any leads. Staying on this course is the best chance we have of finding one.” He looked left and right down the street, and when his eyes settled on her again she saw not the soldier he had fashioned himself into, but a fearful twenty-something looking down the barrel of a loaded gun. “When we do…I can’t bring Claire into that again, Jill…I can’t let her get hurt. If he takes a piece out of me, so be it, at least I tried. But I’m not putting her in danger like that again.”

Jill raised her head, looked to her left and saw Barry and Carlos slowly making their way down the busy street towards them. She smiled towards them, but a chill that had nothing to do with the February weather accompanied it this time. She had asked Carlos to help her take down Umbrella, to destroy the company that had destroyed both their lives. But this…this was personal. This was _Wesker_. Umbrella just wanted them dead; Wesker would want them to suffer just because he could. More than that, he knew where to hit them where it would really hurt. Usually, it would be Carlos that she talked this through with, allowing him to assuage her fears the way he always did, and she had relied on him for so long now that she wasn’t sure how to work through this alone. Trusting in someone was all well and good, but it was harder when they played an integral part in the fears that ailed you.

“You think he’ll come after us?” she asked.

Chris looked up, looked at her. Then, he took one last drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out against the bin next to him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it fucking terrifies me. I want him dead, but at what cost? What’s the point if we can’t protect the people we love?”

It was an honesty he kept only for her. Claire would never know, even Barry and Rebecca would have only heard a muted version of it.

Umbrella weren’t the only enemy anymore. This thing was bigger than any of them could have anticipated, and for the first time since leaving America she was hit with a twinge of regret.

Before she could think too deeply into this, Barry and Carlos approached with an extra spring in their step.

“Turns out this place has a few bars,” Carlos said. “Barry and I were saying that drinks at the weekend sounds like a hell of an idea.”

“Been a while since we did anything fun,” Barry agreed.

Chris observed his old friend with an amused smirk playing on his lips.

“Since when was bar-hopping your idea of fun, Burton?”

“My hair may be thinning but I still know how to let it down,” Barry defended with a chuckle. “Might be a good opportunity for some team bonding.”

Barry could not have been more obvious if he had taken Carlos’s hand and Chris’s and forced them to shake. Both younger men, however, elected to ignore this.

“You mean, it’s a way for Jill to spend most of the night vomiting on the sidewalk?”

Heat rose to her cheeks and she slapped Chris’s bicep roughly.

“That happened one time!” she argued. “I told you I don’t drink sambuca, but you insisted on doing shots.”

“Then how about the time you tried to get Forest to agree to marry you if you both reached 30 and were still single?”

“I was heartbroken that time.”

“When you and Joseph scaled that statue of Spencer?”

Her cheeks burned and she could see the corners of Carlos’s mouth twitch upwards.

“Ok,” she sighed. “I can’t hold my drink, I think we get it.”

The smile that found her then was a little more genuine and she felt the tension in her gut ease. A night of partying was probably irresponsible given the current climate and their goals, but Barry was right – they kind of needed this.

With the ghost of a smile on her lips, she felt warm fingertips slide across her palm. Tiny static pricks of electricity shot up her arm, straight to her chest. Such a tender touch; a moment out of sight, just between them. It was his signal, knowing that she wasn’t the biggest fan of public displays of affection; he would nudge but she would have to respond. It wasn’t so much testing the waters as asking permission. Usually she was eager to grant it – anything for Carlos – but this time…this time she curled her fingers into a fist and pulled away. She felt him tense beside her, but he said nothing.

“We need anything else?” Chris asked. She could feel the tension rolling off him too, could almost see his fingers twitching towards the pocket he kept his lighter in.

“Food?” Jill suggested. “It’s almost lunch time, would save us cooking.”

“Sounds good to me,” Barry agreed.

Chris, on the other hand, looked from Jill, to Barry, to a spot just above Carlos’s left shoulder.

“I’m going to find Claire,” he said after a sharp intake of breath, and before she could say anything he was already gone.

~~

**January 15 th, 1999. 21:15.**

The house held no calm for her, not anymore. There was a perpetual sense of dread that lingered now and here, in the darkness of her bedroom, it stalked her still.

Jill gathered the photos before her in one hand and pushed them back into the shoebox she kept beside the bed. She didn’t know why she clung on to those mementos still – the ones she had cared about enough to ship out of Raccoon ahead of her house arrest. It did not go amiss that she had chosen that box to fill limited space that other, more important items could have taken up. Memories, she had decided on that warm August day, were more important than anything, and those of her late friends and comrades were more precious to her than anything else in this world. Maybe that was why she kept them, why she revisited them every time she came close to forgetting even the smallest detail.

It was only when she felt a drip of moisture against her hand that she realised she was crying, and she pawed at her tears in frustration.

The bedroom door creaked open and her swipes at the moisture beneath her eyes became more frantic. When Carlos stepped through she expected to relax, to feel the comfort his company so often brought, but instead she felt the urge to turn away, to not let him see the redness of her eyes. But nothing got past him. It was like he had a sixth sense for this shit, and he was on the bed beside her before she could even think of an appropriate excuse.

“I can leave you be if you want?” he offered when he noticed that the box on the bedside was a little out of position.

She wanted to say yes, to just curl up for ten minutes and cry out what she needed to but her traitorous hand reached for his and gripped it hard enough that he wasn’t going anywhere.

“I thought I was done with this, you know?” she said. “Told myself I was done crying when we left the States.”

“You know that’s not how it works, right?”

“No shit. Look at me.”

She reached for the tissues on the bedside cabinet and began to dab rather than swipe at the tears. It seemed to work a little better, but new ones still followed.

Then, Carlos said something that took her completely by surprise.

“Wesker, right?”

Jill blinked at him.

“Every time his name comes up the air just…changes,” he explained. “I never said anything because it wasn’t my place.”

Deep down she thanked him for that. Some wounds were too raw. This one they had all sutured shut and left to heal, but now…

“They’re dead because of him,” she whispered, her eyes flitting to the box that held the last photographic remains of her friends. She knew that she didn't need to explain herself to him but it came anyway. “He murdered Enrico right before my eyes. Threatened Barry’s family, tried to turn him against us. He offered Chris and I up like a fucking sacrifice to that _thing_ that gutted him. This should have just been Umbrella, but- _F_ _uck_. He’s supposed to be _dead_ , Carlos.”

It was a shadow of the truth, not reflecting the entirety of her fear, but it was all she felt able to offer him. She felt his grip on her hand tighten briefly before he made to pull it away, but she held it in place, knowing what he was trying to do. If he put his arm around her it would all be over. She’d admit things to him, and to herself, that she wasn’t quite ready to face.

“He will be,” Carlos promised, relaxing back into position. “We’ll make sure of that.”

The sharp prickle of fear crept up her spine, traveled along every nerve until she felt cold.

“No. _I_ will. Carlos, you can’t get involved in this.”

Carlos laughed.

“Jill, I’m already pretty involved.”

Their eyes locked, hers piercing, his soft and warm. He meant it: ‘what’s yours is mine, especially the bad shit’. He had once told her, in post-coital warmth, that he would go to the ends of the Earth for her, and here she saw that intent, saw his blood spilled for a cause she had dragged him into.

Her fingers slipped from his.

“Don’t do that,” she warned. Before she broke their gaze she saw something dark slip behind his eyes.

“Do what?”

“ _That_. We swore we would keep this casual.”

“Jill, I was talking about the mission, about all of this. I’m not asking you to marry me, I’m just asking you to trust me.”

For a moment she felt sheepish, and a little ashamed, but she shrugged it off quickly.

“Sorry,” she said. A half-hearted apology. She was too deep in the well of her own sorrow to attune to his, but she truly hadn’t meant to lash out.

Carlos looked at the wall ahead of them, at the windowsill that housed an errant coffee mug gathering dust. She could feel the tension radiating off him and a knot formed in her stomach as she braced herself for what was to come.

But it never did. When he looked to her again the hardness was gone from his eyes and she melted in his gaze.

“Is there anything you need from me?” he asked.

Yes, was the answer. Everything. It was something she would have to address at some point, but the thought of that alone frightened her. What she felt for Carlos was new and terrifying, and that which he reflected back at her did not assuage any of those fears. Whatever she asked for, he would give, he had made that abundantly clear.

So, she asked for nothing. Instead, she opened herself up, allowed herself to feel that irresistible pull, raised one hand to run through his hair and allowed the other to slide up the inside of his thigh, the fabric of his jeans rough against her palm.

“Let me handle this,” she said. “Please. If anything happened to you because of my vendetta, I would never be able to forgive myself.”

He smiled warmly at her.

“Stop worrying about me,” he said. “You remember what I said in the subway?”

“I try to forget, every day.”

“Well tough shit, ‘cause I meant it. I’ve been through a lot; more than you know, even. I can handle myself. I didn’t go through all that to die here.”

She wanted to tell him how little control he would have over that, wanted to outline exactly who Wesker was, and how that tremble in Chris’s voice as he delivered the news was not exhaustion. It was not his battle, though. It was not his burden to bear. She had already asked far too much of him. So concerned was she over the things she couldn't say, she failed to notice what he _had_ said, and what it implied.

Looking at him, in the soft light of the setting sun, she felt a happiness that had been so elusive until she had met him. The kind that had flourished the moment their lips had first touched and shown no signs of abating. It felt a far cry from everything else they wallowed in. She wondered, not for the first time, just what the last few months would have been like without him. And then her mind traveled down a familiar path of futures yet unwritten, of things he had her longing for that she could not quite bring herself to believe in. She thought also of what she wouldn’t do to ensure his safety, to protect him the way he had so diligently protected her when she was at her weakest. Truth was, that was ‘nothing’.

Sometimes, he looked back at her like he was thinking the same things, and maybe he was? They never talked about their relationship (or lack thereof), never talked about distant futures. But when he looked at her like that, like he was looking at her then and now, he didn’t need to say a damn thing. It was something she had grown to love but in that moment it only frightened her.

The intensity in his gaze pulled her in, pulled down her walls. Dangerous words danced on the tip of her tongue and even as she swallowed them her hand moved further up his thigh, high enough that she felt a muscle twitch and when her lips found his she was immediately on her back beneath him.

There was a ferocity in his touch that alarmed her as much as it excited her but she promised herself that she would address it later; Carlos was never needy but he kissed her like she wasn’t the one in need of comfort, like by losing himself in her he would also lose a bit of himself that he was keen to shake. Clothes were pulled roughly from sweaty bodies and the love they made was hard, desperate, and raw. She came with a cry he swallowed as her long fingers gripped his hair, and his climax came with her thighs around him and his grip on her hips tightening almost painfully. Though physically intact, they both felt bruised and exposed, but thoroughly satisfied. Whatever had ailed her in the moments before that kiss had dissipated and once he had cleaned up he joined her on the bed, pulling her into his arms and kissing and stroking her so tenderly he felt like a different man to the one that had been needfully inside her only moments before.

There was something he wanted to say – she could pinpoint exactly where in his chest he held it, ran her fingers over the damp hair and warm skin there, unsure if she wanted to coax it out or silence it. For the first time since their kiss in the Ohio farmhouse, she felt lost, like she had started something she wasn’t sure how to handle. It didn’t matter that the happiness she felt in the silent glow that fell over them then was incomparable, that nothing else she felt these days came close. All she saw was the future she wanted with him, the future that had almost begun to feel tenable, and a red stain across it.


	3. Nocturna Oppressio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She considered, for a moment, that maybe she wasn’t as strong as she had always pretended she was. And that just wouldn’t do. This was war, and war ate the weak. It chewed them up and spat the unlucky ones back out. She couldn’t afford to be weak.
> 
> ~~
> 
> Some things go bump in the night, others go bang.

**January 22 nd, 1999. Late.**

Howls, echoing into dark infinite depths, faded to gunfire, to the smell of fire and blood. Sweaty soldiers, trekking through dense jungle, became average Joes on the street, packing and waiting for trouble. The memories swirled together in a hypnopompic haze; violence became pleasure, closed fists became open palms, the run-down streets of nameless towns became the high-rises of New York and then the towering infernos of Raccoon City.

Carlos woke in silence, unsure if he had truly been asleep at all. He was shaking, hair stuck to his brow with sweat. Next to him, Jill slumbered on, facing away from him, arms curled around herself almost protectively. The disorientation took a moment to dissipate and when it did he rose to his feet as quietly as he could and slipped into the ensuite bathroom.

The water he splashed on his face didn’t seem cool enough and only served to further dampen his long hair. He drew his fingers through it in frustration, combing it back out of his eyes. His reflection laughed back at him, remembering the futility. He did this every day. Stared himself down every day.

His hands lowered to tremble against the cold porcelain of the sink and did very little to steady him.

The nightmares were getting worse. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Just when he felt like he was getting some semblance of normality back in his life, the rug was pulled out from under him. And they weren’t just the fevered dreams of zombies and eight-foot tall terrors. No, these were the real kind, the ones that masqueraded as human. They were the drug runs under the cover of darkness, the close calls in enemy territory. They were nights that started with drinks and merriment and ended in someone getting shot and all hell breaking loose. There were things he had forgotten, bubbling to the surface. Like the first time he had held a gun, at the age of thirteen. He’d forgotten how powerful it had made him feel in a world that seemed to kick the ever-loving shit out of kids like him. Maybe that was the moment his path had been set. Perhaps that’s when he realised that he was done being the victim, done watching the people with power trample over those without. He laughed as he considered what he would have said to that kid if he met him now.

Run. Run for your life.

The quiet laughter snapped him out of the funk just enough to be aware of his surroundings…and the fact that he was completely naked.

Had it been any other time of day he would have climbed into the shower and washed away the sweat and the worry. At 2am he settled for scraping his hair back into as much of a bun as he could manage and retrieved a crumpled pair of sweatpants from where they had been discarded on the bathroom floor.

Jill still slept soundly when he emerged, though she had expanded her territory to include a sliver of his side of the bed. It brought a smile to his face and for a moment he leaned against the doorframe and just looked at her, wondering not for the first time how he had got so lucky. But, like flames charring the edges of this perfect picture, unwelcome thoughts crept in. He was damn lucky to have met her, even more so to get to wake up to her every day. But every time he did, he felt more and more like he was intruding, like he was the kid who just didn’t get the hint when the others didn’t want to play with them.

He thought back to the evening before, to the sweet heaven that had preceded those hard nightmares. Jill had been somewhat reticent over the past few days, hiding away, seeming to only converse with Chris and keep short snippets of small talk for everyone else, even him. Their gym sessions had devolved from playful banter to fierce concentration on her behalf and there always seemed to be something distracting her. He hadn’t pried or poked – that wasn’t his place. But she pulled and hid, and he was finding it increasingly difficult not to take it to heart.

Carlos had always had an exuberant personality. He’d had his heart broken a couple times and his mother had just tutted and told him that the Latino spirit was strong with him, that he loved too hard and too soon…like his father. Part of him wondered if that was his problem now. They had agreed not to get too deep into anything, to cage their feelings, but he was so sure he was in love with her and he’d have sang it to everyone who would listen if he was sure it wouldn’t scare her away.

Sometimes, he thought she might love him too. The previous night had held one of those moments. She had hovered over him in post-coital bliss, looking out from beneath strands of messy hair, and he had placed a hand on her cheek and kissed her roughly. She hadn’t moved, and when he pulled away in concern she was looking back at him with an intensity that had almost swallowed him whole. He could almost see the words on the tip of her tongue, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to coax them out, was too afraid that if he broke the moment she might never look at him like that again. In the end, she had just bit her lip and pulled away, like she’d been caught doing something she really shouldn’t have. But he had seen it, and the simple recollection of it pulled him back closer to his centre and shook away that awful nightmare-induced malaise.

Sleep, however, was a little way off so he slipped quietly out of the room, tiptoed down the hallway and made his way to the kitchen for something that might help.

It surprised him to find that the light was already on downstairs, and Claire stood slumped and half-asleep over the island.

When she heard someone approach, she reacted defensively, a hand twitching towards a set of cutlery nearby.

“Jesus,” she gasped in a hurried whisper. “You want me dead before I turn twenty?”

She scowled at him, and he bit back a snort of laughter. If being dragged backwards through a hedge was a look, she wore it and she wore it well. Before him was a girl who was hating every second she was awake.

“If I say no, will that guarantee my safety?” he asked.

The scowl deepened, and then he noticed her eyes flit downwards and a blush appear on her cheeks.

“Uh, shit,” he said. “I’ll…go get a shirt.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “Chest hair was never my thing; your innocence is safe here.”

This time he did laugh, then he moved past her to retrieve a glass he promptly filled with ice from the freezer and a splash of rum from a bottle in the wine rack.

“You cannot be this alert at this hour,” she accused him.

“What about you? You’re awake.”

“Barely.”

There was something in the way she said this that brought him back over to the island and onto a stool opposite where she stood. He barely knew this girl, outside of his attempts to navigate her through the apparently perilous world of Spanish grammar, but something brought him to want to at least see if he could help.

“If it helps…me too,” he said.

She didn’t say anything to this, just bowed her head to set her face in shadow.

“Don’t tell Chris,” she asked in a quiet plea after a long silence. “Last thing I need is him worrying.”

“He’s your brother. It’s kind of his job to worry.”

“You speaking from experience?”

Perhaps realising that she was going nowhere, Claire slid onto her own stool and reached for an orange atop the fruit bowl at the end of the island.

“No siblings,” Carlos answered. “A lot of cousins that may as well be, though.”

“You worry about them unnecessarily?”

Carlos smiled as he watched her pick at the orange rind.

“Other way around,” he said. “I was the one getting into fights and needing a steer back onto the right path. So maybe it wasn’t so unnecessary.”

“You were FARC, right?”

A chill passed through him. Should he answer? He thought about Chris, about how little ammunition he needed to be so passively hostile. Should he really give him more?

“On the periphery,” he said. Because in the end it was Claire that was asking, and she was alright. “Worked with a lot of people, all with the same goal. Whoever wanted to pay me, so long as their values aligned with my own. Shit, sometimes they could pay me in a bed and warm meal and I’d be sold. But yeah…I ran in those circles.”

“Why’d you leave?”

Carlos considered this as he watched her peel rind from skin and begin to work free a wedge of orange. Nobody had asked him that yet.

“You think you can change the world,” he said, eyes still fixed on the orange. “You think you’re doing the right thing, then one day you wake up, look around and wonder what exactly about the blood, the violence and the fear is doing any good in this already fucked up world. You realise that maybe you’ve become part of the problem.”

He looked up, met her eyes and smiled.

“Then you join Umbrella.”

Claire snickered at this, then offered him some orange, which he refused.

“Chris doesn’t mean to be such an asshole about that, you know,” she said. “Well, he does but… He’s been through a lot. He had to put one of his best friends down last year. So when another shows up with someone who worked for the company responsible for the worst night of his life…you can see where his caveman brain goes.”

Carlos grunted. Chris was nothing, but his jabs and digs were beginning to wear through the wall of indifference he had erected between them. It didn’t help that Jill didn’t say a damn thing, was content for them to exist in their own separate spaces. And the more that Chris got away with, the bolder he became.

“What have I got to do to prove he can trust me?”

Claire shrugged.

“He’ll come round eventually.”

That’s what everyone kept saying. But when was ‘eventually’? Sooner or later they would end up armed and in close quarters – truth be told, Carlos wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t end up with a stray bullet in his back when the time came.

“You really care what he thinks of you?”

“Couldn’t give a rat’s ass. But Jill cares about him for some reason and I care about her, so… Something’s gotta give.”

* * *

Blood and claws and gnashing teeth. That’s what set Chris on the bumpy road to reluctant consciousness. It was not unfamiliar territory, but the trees and empty hallways of the Spencer Estate were now replaced with snowy tundras, clinical hallways, and a cell he always arrived at just a moment too late.

His room was one of the smaller ones of the house (the perks of being the last to arrive), but the close walls offered a modicum of comfort. Here, he knew where everything was, knew that his gun, his knife and escape route were all close by. Maybe he didn’t have a bathroom like Jill and Rebecca did, but he would take comfort over a short walk for a piss any day.

When his breaths steadied, he reached for the firearm he kept in his bedside drawer and checked it over, just to be safe. Fully loaded, clean, functional. With trembling hands, he placed it back where it belonged.

Beneath the boxes of ammunition, a photograph peeked out, its curled corners calling out to him in a soft whisper. He had a lot of photographs in that drawer, and this one would have served its time better beneath the protective sheets of a proper album, but he needed to keep it close to him. He held it in his hands, running his eyes over every line, every shadow, every glint of light. He could barely remember this one being taken. Behind the glossy finish, a younger version of himself grinned happily from between his parents, a very small Claire perched on the shoulders of their father. He couldn’t even remember who had taken the photo, but it was one of his favourites.

Almost ten years had passed since they were lost but not one day went by where he didn’t miss them. Everything had gone to shit after they had gone. He was angry and looking for someone to blame, almost got kicked out of high school and ensured a swift return from two separate foster homes. Maybe if they had still been around he would have ended up in college, not the Air Force. Maybe he would have avoided this whole sorry ordeal. Claire would be without the trauma he had inflicted upon her with his negligence, maybe he’d even be married by now?

But he wouldn’t have met Jill, or Rebecca, even Barry. Forest, Ken, Richard, Joseph, all of them. They would have been going through this nightmare with or without him. He couldn’t imagine a life they weren’t a part of. No, this was how it was meant to be, how it was always meant to be.

He pushed the photograph back into the depths of the drawer and rose to his feet. Sleep was a distant dream now. So, he moved as quietly as he could down the hallway, surrounded by silence. From downstairs, he heard quiet voices; not loud enough to wake those sleeping, but just enough to prick at his senses. As he worked his way towards the staircase he noticed that Jill’s door was ajar and he moved towards it, reaching out to pull it closed out of habit. Before he could even touch the handle, a sound from inside urged him to push, not pull.

“No,” she breathed, clutching a pillow to her chest and pressing her face hard into it.

No sooner had he laid eyes on her did he realise that she was naked, only the thin sheet protecting her modesty. Heat rose to his cheeks and he looked away, deciding that leaving her be was the best option here. That familiar anger began to slosh in the pit of his stomach, too. Not jealousy – she was more like family to him than anything else. But the thought of her with _him_ made him sick. Because at best he was using her, just getting his rocks off while he could and would be gone when a better opportunity came along. At worst, it was more insidious, and while they could all be in danger ultimately she would be the one hit hardest by the inevitable. He’d known Jill long enough to understand just how much it took for her to open up and let someone in. That’s how he knew something wasn’t right. Using him for a comfort fuck, that he could understand. Keeping him around? Either his dick was magic or something else was going on.

As he made to close the door fully, a whimper sounded from inside the room. It was a sound he knew too well, from the nights she had spent in his apartment after the mansion incident.

“Carlos… No…”

Fear laced her words, and she twitched in her sleep. It wasn’t fear directed at the name she had spoken, but rather worry, concern…grief. She stirred again, curling up almost into a foetal position, and then she relaxed, and let out a soft snore as the moment passed.

Anger followed him back into the hallway. It was all he seemed to feel these days. Now though, concern punctuated it, poked holes in what he thought he knew. He wished that he could make sense of it all, but his own psyche seemed to be fractured into pieces that didn’t quite slot back together. Claire and Jill had both been nagging him to quit smoking, but this was why he had not bothered. Already, his mind was on the pack and lighter he had left by the back door. If nothing else, it would help still his mind enough to maybe get a couple more hours sleep.

Claire’s room was empty too as he passed, and he heard her soft laughter drifting up the staircase. He already knew what awaited him, so he pushed through to the living room with direct purpose and a route plotted out in his mind.

Sure enough, she was not alone. Carlos sat opposite her on the kitchen island, half-naked himself and clutching an empty glass. That was another thing. Even Claire wasn’t on his side this time. He had considered asking her to not study with him, but he knew how terrible her Spanish was and she seemed to be doing a lot better since their sessions. It wasn’t something he would ever thank him for, but perhaps letting them continue was appreciation enough. It wasn’t like he’d be able to stop her anyway; she was as bull-headed as he was.

“Well, now this is a party,” Claire said when she saw him. “Hope we didn’t wake you up?”

“Nah, just needed a smoke.”

She said nothing but she didn’t buy it. You didn’t just wake up in the middle of the night for a smoke.

“I thought you were trying to quit?” she asked.

“This is my first one today!”

She didn’t respond to that and ignored him as he made his way to the back door, collecting the half-empty pack of cigarettes on the way. Carlos said nothing to him, and it wasn’t until he had stepped into the crisp February air that the low hum of conversation picked up again.

For a moment Chris regretted not grabbing his coat but as he took his first drag and his throat burned delightfully he found that his thin T-shirt was more than enough. If anything, the chill helped.

He really was trying to quit, but smoking was the only stress-release he knew any more, and he had never needed that more than he did now. He blew plumes of smoke into the air, watched as they pirouetted upwards and vanished into the darkness. Maybe he’d quit after the next pack. He laughed at this – he’d been saying that for months. And if he did quit, what would he replace it with? Exercise was proving a good distraction, but he couldn’t spend every waking hour in the gym.

Maybe when the lease ran out, he would consider it. He was already thinking that he would find an apartment with Claire, just a small one, somewhere quiet. He’d been considering asking Jill too - with any luck Carlos would be out of the picture by then.

Chris stubbed the last of his cigarette out against the wall and dropped it into a bucket at his feet, trying not to notice just how full it was getting. When he stepped back into the house and locked the door behind him a peal of quiet laughter from the direction of the kitchen worked its way beneath his skin. By the time he walked back through, both Claire and Carlos were standing by the hallway door, voices reduced almost to a whisper.

“I’ll help clear everyone out,” he heard Claire say as he drew closer. “It’ll be great, she’ll love it.”

Carlos didn’t seem convinced, and when Claire caught sight of her brother she turned to him in quiet urgency.

“Hey Chris,” she hissed, louder for the attempt at hushing herself. “Pizza and a movie, a few beers – that sound like Jill’s ideal quiet, no-fuss date night?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Come on, you’ve known her longer than anyone else here. I’m trying to help Carlos out.”

“Well, I’d think he knows his girlfriend better than I do.”

Carlos bristled a little at this.

“Not my girlfriend,” he said. His words were almost monotonous, like they were read from a script he wasn’t all that invested in.

“But…” Claire jumped in with. “It’s Valentine’s day soon and he said it doesn’t feel right not doing anything.”

He could see what Claire was doing and maybe Carlos did too because he grimaced at her words. It wouldn’t work. It would take a hell of a lot more than treating Jill to pizza and a movie for him to trust a damn thing he said or did.

“Sounds like a girlfriend to me.”

“I don’t think it’s any of your damn business either way.”

Enough of a reaction prickled up his spine, and he would have turned it into something material had a low scream of primal horror not cut through the otherwise still quiet of the house. The prickle was gone, replaced by a different kind of discomfort. Even Carlos had paled at the sound.

“Jill…”

* * *

Jill woke to darkness and a sense of loneliness she had not felt in some time. The room twisted and warped around her as she pushed herself upright, bringing with it an odd sense of nausea.

“Great,” she groaned. She could not recall a nightmare, or a dream for that matter, but the sea-sickness they so often tended to leave her with lingered.

Carlos was absent, not even the imprint of his shape against the mattress remaining. She would have to talk to him, eventually. She kept saying that. But how could she kid herself into thinking she could help with his demons when she could barely even keep a leash on her own?

‘That’s what you’re supposed to be doing though,’ she reminded herself. ‘Trusting in one another, sharing burdens so you don’t have to bear them alone.’

Well, that street worked both ways. That’s what she told herself.

The glass at her bedside was empty, and the one on Carlos’s was missing. Did she really want to take a trip downstairs, through the shadows of the hallway? Did she really want to risk one of the others hearing her and asking questions? Did she not picture Carlos already downstairs and balk at the thought of alerting him to her sudden ailment?

No, she would lay here and fester, like she used to, back in…

That’s what this was, wasn’t it? That old friend, the one she thought she had ditched when she had decided she wasn’t going to let herself be weak anymore. This was exactly how she had been in the days when her friends’ deaths were still fresh in her mind, when dirt and debris still clung to the skin around her nails. When the demons screamed rather than whispered.

And what had caused this?

Wesker. Of all things.

He was dead, gone, done for. At least, he should have been. And that was the condition of her sanity, the closure for her grief. It was the ‘because of’ that had led to her opening up to someone, to letting someone back in. No personal debts, no cheques anyone would cash in on her life. Wesker never had liked loose ends. She had wondered at one time if something psychiatric had underpinned it, but it made him a better Captain, not a worse one. It drove them all to be better cops, to tear apart and analyse their own deductions, to weed out any clauses that may prove problematic and deal with them before they had the chance to bloom into something hardier and more invasive.

They were never meant to leave that place. That was the plan, they all knew that now. ‘X-Day’, Umbrella had called it. None of them needed to die; it was an act of flamboyance, of a desire to generate combat data for Umbrella’s projects. While Umbrella may be willing to write them off as dead so long as they remained silent, would Wesker be so complacent? Surely he knew that they would want to hunt him down. Hadn’t he always said that pro-action was always better than reaction? And he already knew how to hit them where it hurt, had used Barry’s family against him and now Chris’s against him. Her father was safe, behind bars where nobody could get to him, and she had instructed him to act like she had disowned him, like he thought she was crazy ( _“Whatever you need, Jilly, you just keep yourself safe”_ ). She had no other family, her mother having passed when she was young and both parents lacking siblings. No brothers or sisters to call her own, barely any friends to miss.

Just Carlos. Kind, caring Carlos, who she really didn’t need to worry about but still found herself doing just that.

Inviting him into this hell had been one thing when it was his hell too, but this was different. It would get personal. Was personal. It was her war, not his, her personal vendetta, but he could still pay the price for that. She couldn’t do that, not again. Tyrell had already cashed out. Mikhail too. The civilians on the subway. All dead because she put them in harm’s way.

Sometimes, she regretted returning to the subway station enough that it kept her awake at night. How differently would it have ended? Sure, Nicholai would have survived but even that had its silver lining – perhaps Bard would still be alive too, the vaccine would still exist and maybe, just maybe, Raccoon City would still be standing.

She could already hear Carlos’s voice in her head, Chris’s too; Rebecca’s, Barry’s, anyone who thought she would listen. ‘You can’t take that on yourself, Jill’. But she did. And she couldn’t add to that, couldn’t cause more collateral damage, especially not to the people she loved.

And there it was again. Love. She could see it, on the horizon. A light at the end of the tunnel that may as well have been a freight train. True, she wouldn’t know which it was if she didn’t walk towards it but there was the possibility of wreckage and she couldn’t afford to be left bleeding out on the tracks.

God, she’d sworn that she wouldn’t let it get to this, but somehow had known all along that it would happen eventually. She’d never had a problem separating emotions from sex when she needed to in the past, but Carlos was different. She cared about him, and that was the problem. People she cared about tended to get hurt. It didn’t matter how strong he was, that he’d saved her life numerous times, that he was rough and ready and probably stronger and more capable even than the older members of their group. He was a responsibility she had taken on and now she’d royally fucked up.

Jill opened her eyes and somewhere in her midnight grief she had fallen back into the mattress and pillows. She groaned, swore, and pushed herself to her feet this time.

The house was eerily quiet, the doors scattered down the hallway locking away the sounds of their occupants. Even Barry’s snores were absent.

There was a light downstairs, and it was Carlos she found, as expected, by the back door, looking out into the darkness. He turned at her arrival, her footsteps muffled against the soft carpet.

“Hey,” he greeted.

“Hey yourself. What’re you looking at?”

He looked back out into the black void of the garden and then turned fully, shrugging with a smile as his fingers danced across the line of her hips.

“Thought I saw something,” he said. “Think my mind’s playing tricks on me.”

“Insomnia will do that to you.”

There should have been a retort, a comparison drawn between them, but he remained schtum on the matter.

“There’s something on your mind,” he pointed out.

“Maybe there is.”

“You gonna share it?”

“I don’t know.”

They needed to talk, one way or another. But her brain did the thing it did every time she saw him – it numbed in a serotonin-induced complacency, comfortable when it should have been alert. Because this was a good thing and they didn’t come around often. The last thing she wanted to do was open her stupid mouth and ruin it. Or worse – hurt him. She had a knack for that too, for drawing so far into herself those venomous spines protracted and anyone silly enough to try to find her beneath them got a face full of barbs.

Carlos was her normal, her centre. He was the promise of a picket fence at the end of all this. She’d never been the picket fence type, wasn’t even sure that was what she wanted but it felt good to consider in those moments of darkness, where all she saw was a bloody, violent end. Once, he had raised the question of what they were fighting for, if not moments of calm and the company of those they loved, and she had wondered that ever since. Vengeance could only drive one so far and one day they would have to be done with this. What did they want to see the day after tomorrow? An unending war with mounting casualties, or retirement in a better world they had helped create?

A thumb brushed against her cheek, snapping her from her reverie. She looked up into his dark eyes, teetered on the edge of a confession.

There was a sudden, sharp sound. Not quite the shattering of glass, but the _tink_ of a shard flying somewhere. A warm spray across her face, a look of shock in Carlos’s eyes. He fell forward, steadying himself in time to not drag them both to the ground. There was blood streaking down his right arm, a clean hole in his shoulder.

“Run!” he shouted at her.

The serotonin haze was gone, and she dove for the kitchen counter, for the gun hidden at the back of the tea towel drawer.

Another _tink_ , and Carlos fell this time. She ran to him, saw thick blood pool on the beige carpet beneath his leg.

“Help!” she screamed, not knowing how else to alert the others. The wound looked painful but he would live. When a glance in the direction of the garden uncovered nothing, she handed him the gun and hooked both hands beneath his armpits, dragging him towards the cover of the kitchen island.

There were no thunderous footsteps, no alarmed shouts or confused cries. Where were the others?

From their cover, she heard the glass of the back door completely shatter, heard heavy footsteps inside the house.

“Get out of here,” Carlos urged. “I’ll hold them off.”

“Fuck that,” she hissed, pulling the gun from his hands. “It’s one man, he’s as good as dead.”

Maybe it was one man. But when she emerged, when she saw _which_ man it was, her muscles seemed to calcify, hardened almost beyond function.

“ _You_.”

She let off three shots, every single one impacting exactly where she had intended – the torso, much more likely to land than the head from this distance. But he brushed them off like they were nothing, continued forward with a wide smirk until he wrested the gun from her grip and sent her crumpling to the floor with a blow to the ribs that knocked the air from her lungs.

Wesker. Just as Chris has described – clad in black, sunglasses even in darkness, the hint of an amber glow behind them.

“Your reflexes aren’t quite what they used to be, Jill,” he taunted.

She coughed, spluttered, and attempted to pull herself to her feet, but he pushed her back down with a boot on her shoulder and barely any effort at all. Then…he turned to the man leaking blood onto the kitchen tiles.

“And you must be Carlos Oliveira,” he sang. “One of such a small number of UBCS brats to have survived Raccoon City. That’s quite a feat. Shame you weren’t around when I was recruiting for S.T.A.R.S.”

Jill shivered in the warmth of the house’s central heating.

“Fuck you,” she growled. Anything to pull his attention back to her.

Wesker moved and fingers closed around her throat, raising her until her toes dragged against the carpet. He didn’t even break a sweat, lifted her as though she weighed nothing.

“Let her go!” Carlos screamed. He tried to move, to push himself forward, but his injuries weighed him down and Wesker was able to knock him onto his back like he was swatting a fly.

“Four little canaries escaped their cages,” he said. “Four sets of wings to clip. Let’s start with yours.”

His arm moved, tilting her just enough that she could see him place a heavy boot on Carlos’s chest. Carlos grabbed at it, pushed and twisted his body, but he only slid against the tiles beneath him, a fresh rivulet of blood flowing out of the wound in his shoulder.

“Let him go!” Jill cried. Tried to. Her voice came out as barely a strangled scream. She struggled against the arm that held her, beat her fists against it to no avail.

Wesker looked at her, and the corner of his lips twisted upwards in a vile smirk. Carlos cried out, this time in pain, locking the ends of his palms beneath the boot that pressed downwards against his ribcage.

“No!” Jill begged, not even sure if her pleas manifested as words. “Please! Let him go. It’s me you want. Please…”

A crack echoed around them and Carlos’s agonised cry cut right through her. Blood ejected itself from his lips in a fine spray, every breath becoming a cough, a splutter of crimson. Jill tried to scream, but while the compression Wesker applied to her throat was not enough to stop her breathing, it was enough to choke any sound to a rasp.

Slowly, Carlos’s struggles became less enthusiastic, until his grip slipped down the leather of Wesker’s boot and his arms fell limply by his side.

Jill crumpled to the floor, the support of Wesker’s hand at her throat gone. She wheezed, spluttered, choked on the air that suddenly forced its way down her throat, cold and sharp. Her vision blurred, but she could see Carlos laying still just ahead, and the shadow of her enemy towering above them.

“C-Carlos,” she called. But he didn’t answer. His eyes stared unblinkingly back at her, blood streaked in his beard. His chest was bent and broken, his skin already settling into a pallid shade. There was nothing left of him here.

She tried to scream, just once more. A horrible, wailing cry broke free, tearing her throat to shreds as her world collapsed in on itself. All the while, laughter echoed around her.

The distant thunder of footsteps met that terrible shriek in the darkness of her bedroom, safe and secure in the sheets she had fallen asleep in. But her brain was lagging, and she continued to gulp desperate mouthfuls of air when the door flung open and light exploded somewhere above her head. She flinched, pulled the sheets up to her chest, looked at the shapeless, soundless figures that rushed towards her.

And then, as her head broke the surface of her terror, sound rushed back in.

“Jill!”

“What happened?”

“Is she okay?”

“What’s going on?”

A hand reached out for her, but the figure closest to her threw out an arm and looked angrily back at the second.

“Give her some fucking space!”

That voice…

Another hand appeared in front of her, palm up. Her eyes travelled from the palm, up a muscular arm, to a shoulder that was free of any wounds, across a chest that heaved slightly, peppered with dark hair. When her eyes fell on his face she let out a soft sound and reached for him, forgoing the hand to wrap her arms around him, finding that she relaxed only when he took her signal and held her back just as desperately.

“C’mon, Chris,” she heard Claire whisper from somewhere near the door. “Let’s leave them be.”

Her mind was not on the others leaving the room, but on the man she clung to, and the images that still played out in her head.

“You scared the hell out of us,” Carlos whispered. “That scream… Jill, that… Fuck, tell me you’re okay. Tell me and I’ll believe you.”

But she couldn’t. She couldn’t find the strength to lie to him.

It was a turning point. A moment of fear, the kind she was simply unaccustomed to. It shook her as she clung to Carlos for dear life, as she buried her head in his neck and tasted the salt of her own tears against his skin. Because she considered, for a moment, that maybe she wasn’t as strong as she had always pretended she was. And that just wouldn’t do. This was war, and war ate the weak. It chewed them up and spat the unlucky ones back out. She couldn’t afford to be weak.

When they parted he looked at her imploringly, pleading for some give, for her to open up, confide in him, and let him share some of that burden. But not this time. She’d already put too much weight on his shoulders, and one of these days they were going to crack. She couldn’t do that to him anymore.

So, she let him hold her as they laid down to rest. But they did not sleep that night. Nobody did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's Chapter 3, a little later than I'd planned! Chapter 4 is giving me no end of strife and I wanted to get it in a good place before I posted this, in case I needed to tweak anything. Thankfully I ended up not having to change anything, because this was a rare occasion where I was happy with the first draft of a chapter. There's a lot of darker/horror-centric things to come and this chapter was a nice and fun, albeit brief, dabble in that :).
> 
> Thank you again to everyone who left a comment for the last chapter - I'm already running out of ways to express how grateful I am to each and every one of you. I hope you enjoy this one, please let me know if you do (or don't)!


	4. Retrograde

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chris cornered him in the kitchen when he made to exchange his empty bottle for a full one, in a move that wasn’t quite unexpected. He’d loosened the cap with a magnet holding up a takeout leaflet on the fridge and handed the cheap beer over to the younger man with a barely perceptible nod towards the garden.
> 
> “You get anything?” he asked once they had moved closer to the back door, out of earshot of the others.
> 
> “Claire warned me about your paranoia, you know,” Leon said. “I think she expected me to be the one you didn’t trust.”
> 
> ~~
> 
> What is the past, if not a thing that haunts us?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was hoping to get this chapter posted a bit earlier and follow up with another update soon after but work and real life stuff has just completely thrown me off this week and I’m a bit closer to catching up with myself now, so apologies for that D=. We are coming to the end of the first ‘act’ of the story now, which is exciting! Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with me this far, you have no idea how much I appreciate your comments and how they keep me motivated through tough creative times.
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy the latest chapter :). Next one coming....soon....hopefully. May have a treat to go with it too ;).

**January 24 th, 1999. 21:00. Northern Spain.**

Leon still wasn’t accustomed to Spanish road signs, and the four coffees he had consumed since lunch seemed to only exacerbate the constant jangle of his nerves. There were days where he wondered if he had made the right decision, forced into a high-pressure conversation in his military-issue joggers back at the quarantine camp in early October. This was one of them.

_“Think of all the good you could do,” Benford implored. “We need people like you, Leon. I don’t want soldiers, I want survivors; people who understand what’s at stake, what we are fighting for and why that matters.”_

It had been a hell of a speech, and of course he had eaten it all up. Two months of grueling physical training that had loaned more definition to his physique had followed, combined with book study and even a little bit of the stuff they usually reserved for people who technically didn’t exist (and any evidence to the contrary would be denied vehemently). It hadn’t been anything like the academy, that was for sure, but he had emerged feeling significantly better equipped to handle what was ahead.

So why did the thought of addressing the others fill him with such dread? Was it because if he were in their shoes he wasn’t so sure how he would take it?

He had already extended an offer of contact to Valentine and Oliveira upon meeting them, and that had ended well enough that he had thought better than to extend it to the rest of them.

_“You’re serious,” she said, eyebrows rising in sync with the droop of her lips. He didn’t know quite how to answer, so he just nodded. “No, thank you.”_

_“You sound sure? Don’t you want to at least hear the full offer?”_

_Valentine shook her head._

_“You know they were in bed with Umbrella, right? There was at least one senator in Spencer’s pocket, and you said yourself they were trying to buy Birkin out. Look, Claire is a good friend of mine, if she trusts you then I do too but I’m not tangling myself up in a cover-up. If we bring them down with Umbrella then so be it.”_

_Leon pressed his lips together tightly. He wanted to tell her that he knew where she was coming from – if he had known back then what he did now then maybe he would have at least thought twice about signing up. But Benford had seemed like someone who really wanted to make a difference, who cared about what they could do to fix things rather than slinging shit around to cover their own stench. If he couldn’t believe in the government, he could at least believe in that._

_“What about you?” he asked Oliveira, who was looking at Valentine with a degree of admiration._

_Carlos cast a furtive glance around the café, then back at Leon, and a bitter laugh fell from his lips._

_“No thanks,” he said. Then, his voice dropped. “I spent two years fighting against my own government – I’m not about to get into bed with one that’s equally as corrupt.”_

The message he brought today was at least a little more palatable, but he expected more of the same.

He pulled into the driveway a few minutes early and took time to check through the file he had prepared, praying that he hadn’t forgotten anything. Valentine would be thorough, would grill him on every inconsistency – he wanted to be prepared, more for her assurance than his comfort.

When he finally knocked, it was Claire that greeted him at the door, with a warm smile and a crushing hug.

“I’m not mad at you pretending you were leaving, before you say anything,” she said as they parted. “But that is contingent on you making it up to me somehow.

“Hey, I did leave,” he defended. “Returning was as much a surprise to me.”

She did not move to let him in out of the cold, but rather stood with her arms folded across her chest and one hip jutting out.

“They sending you to spy on us?”

“No spoilers,” he said. Claire raised an eyebrow. He forgot how she could be. “Okay, okay, maybe we need your help.”

He regretted those words almost immediately.

“So, the great Leon Kennedy needs my help, huh?”

“It was a collective ‘your’ Claire, now can I please come inside?”

She was smiling at him and for a moment the cold didn’t seem to matter. But she stood aside all the same, even bowed a little as she gestured him inside and he couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe he was grateful for this opportunity to reconnect.

There were already cold beers on the table, and a bowl of popcorn he thought felt oddly out of place. The few that had been congregating in the kitchen moved towards the open living area as soon as they saw him arrive. It seemed that they didn’t wait around.

“Okay,” he said, setting himself down in an armchair they had left empty. “Uh, this is…I suppose there’s no easy way of saying this but you’re all aware that the government imposed sanctions on Umbrella back in October, forcing them to cease all operations in the USA?”

A wave of nods, but no verbal response. Ok, he could handle this level of rapt attention.

“Well, we expected this, and it’s going to hit the news in the next couple days, but Umbrella are now suing the US government.”

This time, a few swears were let loose.

“What do they hope to achieve?” Rebecca asked incredulously.

“Nothing,” Carlos answered. “That’s the point. They know the government didn’t prosecute them to begin with because it would implicate them. By essentially defunding Umbrella they hoped they would just collapse in on themselves and take the evidence with them. I don’t think Umbrella expect to win, they just expect to discredit the government, pressure them and force them to retreat.”

“How the hell do you know so much about corporate warfare?” Chris spat.

“I don’t. But I know guerrilla warfare and that’s basically what this is.”

There was a measured amount of bitterness between the two men, but it passed quickly.

“It’s two children arguing over who broke someone else’s toy,” Jill said. “I don’t understand – what does this have to do with us?”

As he met her gaze, Leon could see that she already understood, that she knew what was coming next and was only asking in the hope she was wrong.

“Several things,” he said. “First, we’re fighting back, building up a case…and we want you to be willing to testify.”

“Fuck off,” said Chris. “We tried that, look where it got us.”

“You tried to instigate a police investigation,” Leon pointed out. “In a force controlled by the company you were going after. That was never going to work. This is different. It’s a federal case. The government will back you up, they will provide protection if that’s what you need. If Umbrella win this case they will be more powerful than they ever were. We can’t afford to lose, and your testimony is the strongest evidence we have so far; it predates everything that happened in Raccoon City and you’re the only ones left that know anything about that. We need you.”

They looked to one another, and for a moment their armour slipped just enough that he saw them for what they were – survivors, not soldiers – and the weight of what he was asking them weighed on him too. He hadn’t been given a choice in his testimony – if he had, would he have accepted so easily?

Claire looked over to him, Barry cast a glance towards Chris, and Carlos reached out to place a hand on Jill’s knee. Acts of solidarity, of synchronicity – even this, _especially_ this, they did as a team.

“We’ll do it,” Jill agreed. The others nodded in concurrence. “Just tell us what you need, and we’ll draft up a statement.”

He would thank them properly later, outside of his position as a government representative. This was personal gratitude and they needed to know that.

“Carlos, they want you too,” he said. “As a surviving UBCS member, especially.”

Carlos looked significantly less enthusiastic about this than the others, which surprised him. If anything, he would have thought he would be the most eager, perhaps with no reservations at all.

“I’ll do my part,” he said. “But I’m gonna need some assurances from you.”

“Name them, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Immunity.”

“None of you will be held to account for the actions you took in the mansion, in the city or in the employ of Umbrella.”

“I’m not talking about that,” Carlos said. “I have a past, one that could land me in jail or see me stripped of my dual nationality. Far as I know there’s nothing concrete tying me to it, but I don’t know what Umbrella may have ready to pull out, and I don’t want the government throwing me under the bus either.”

Leon could put two and two together. He was Colombian, returned there after high school and left the army after his mandatory service was fulfilled. Add to that his comments about corrupt governments and fighting against them and it didn’t take a genius to know where Umbrella had pulled him from.

“I’ll put it to them, but I’d wager that wouldn’t be a problem.”

Carlos nodded appreciatively and Leon breathed deeply. The hard part was done. Maybe. And he’d not quite had to argue to the extent that he had hoped. He had sworn to Benford that he would talk them into helping and he hadn’t broken a promise to the man yet.

“Ok, that’s sorted then. I’ll speak to my guys and we’ll figure out a format for this nearer the time. Until then…there’s something else they want. They know you’re all working as part of a larger group now, and they want to offer their assistance.”

“On condition of…?” asked Barry.

“Evidence. They have identified targets outside of the USA and while they have their own unit – my unit – to dispatch where needed, there aren’t nearly enough of us to scratch the surface of what’s out there. You don’t want to join us so we’re asking you to work with us. A quid pro quo. We feed you information, arm you, deal with local governments, kick dirt over your tracks, you make whatever move you were planning to and any evidence you find you submit to us to help with the case.”

It sounded too good to be true, but it wasn’t. The government were desperate, and they knew just how underfunded these groups were and how much red tape they couldn’t cross. There were other agents like him having this same conversation with other groups around the world. Some members of these groups were already behind bars, a simple negotiation away from release. Without their help, Umbrella were likely to win their lawsuit and that was bad news for everyone involved.

“I suppose if we end up on the wrong side of the wrong people, any immunity you offer us in the court case won’t extend that far?” Chris asked.

“Not a chance,” Carlos said sombrely, “Plausible deniability.”

“If you work with us directly, it does. If not, then that depends on the government of the country you’re in at the time and how receptive they are to our negotiations. If it helps, Spain are on board. France too, UK, Ireland, most of Europe for that matter. Nobody wants another Raccoon City on their soil.”

Though nobody seemed too comfortable with the idea they unanimously agreed that it was the best chance they had of success. So, he was given a contact number and the conversation changed pace.

They perused the folder he had prepared for them, and it did not surprise him that the aerial photographs and the blueprints within were not unfamiliar to them. It was a facility, Jill said, that they had been monitoring for some time. A chemical plant on the books but owned by a subsidiary of Umbrella Europe. Security was tight, and surveillance showed that very few entered or left other than security staff on rotating shifts. He had hoped that he would be able to offer them more, but nothing they stumbled across could be counted as that. If anything, they’d dug up more dirt than his people had.

When it was clear that there was nothing further to be gained from discussions, the conversation flowed to something more pleasant. It was here that he noticed that the dynamic of the group had changed since his last visit. That had been part of his training – reading a room, learning possibilities down to which civilians would be more flighty, which security agents more focused, and which marks more dangerous. Here, it told him that something had wormed its way inside this tight-knit group, cold and insidious.

Jill, previously attached to Carlos, sat with her back to him most of the night – language he seemed either resigned or indifferent to. Chris cast a glance to the latter every now and then, and sometimes a softer glance to his old partner. Claire simply sat staring into space while Rebecca and Barry discussed something it was clear Barry couldn’t quite wrap his head around.

Chris cornered him in the kitchen when he made to exchange his empty bottle for a full one, in a move that wasn’t quite unexpected. He’d loosened the cap with a magnet holding up a takeout leaflet on the fridge and handed the cheap beer over to the younger man with a barely perceptible nod towards the garden.

“You get anything?” he asked once they had moved closer to the back door, out of earshot of the others.

“Claire warned me about your paranoia, you know,” Leon said. “I think she expected me to be the one you didn’t trust.”

“You gonna give me what I asked for or just stand there and insult me?”

Leon narrowed his eyes.

“Nothing,” he said. “That’s what I found.”

Chris blinked back at him.

“Nothing? Fuck’s sake, Kennedy, he was with FARC, you saying he doesn’t have a damn thing on his record?”

“Nope. Nothing. Born in Bogota, only child, attended high school in New York, fulfilled twelve months’ mandatory service in the Colombian military, went dark for a little while, then was picked up by Umbrella. It’s as clean as that.”

A peal of laughter rang out from the direction of the group and Chris watched them for a moment, deep in thought.

“You think Umbrella scrubbed his record?”

“They don’t have the power to do that,” Leon said with a faint laugh. “A few members of the UBCS had criminal charges written off but they’re all still there. I mean, I did find a few things that don’t show up in your average background check – a few minor write-ups for disagreements with his CO, looks like he got into a few fights in high school too. His GPA was nothing special, but he had a few extracurriculars volunteering in the community – do you know he taught English to underprivileged kids in his senior year?”

Chris looked at him wearily, scolding him for a joke he hadn’t even told. It had been right there on his school record, he hadn’t even been forced to do it.

“Look man, I know you wanted me to find something but honestly, his story paints the picture of a guy who has seen some of the worst the world has to offer and wants to do what he can to help even that out. People like that, they don’t always make good decisions but that doesn’t make them bad. I didn’t exactly feel comfortable doing any of this, so please don’t ask me for anything else.”

Chris huffed in anger, a sound that was becoming synonymous with him. But he said nothing, and when Leon walked back to the group he just stood there in silence.

* * *

**January 25 th, 1999. 12:15.**

Town was quiet today. The air was dry but clouds lingered overhead, threatening a mid-afternoon squall – anyone with sense would have stayed indoors but he didn’t have a lot of that these days. Besides, he needed the fresh air, needed time away from the house, from the chatter, from…things.

Carlos shoved a handful of pesetas roughly into the coin slot of a payphone, shielded from prying ears, and punched in a number he had burned into his memory long ago, just in case. There was silence for a long moment, not even a dial tone, and he wondered if he had remembered the number or perhaps even the dialing code wrong. Then, it started to ring.

He waited, tapping a foot against the pavement.

“Aló.”

Carlos exhaled at the sound of a familiar voice, and a smile found its way to his lips.

“Hola, Oscar,” he said. “Soy Carlos.”

There was a quiet clatter on the other end of the line, hushed swears, then laughter the likes of which he hadn’t heard for some time.

“¡Carlos, parcero! ¡Pense que estabas muerto!”

“No eres tan afortunado,” Carlos answered with a chuckle. “Hey, you mind if we talk in English?”

“Sure, sure. Give me two seconds.” There was a muffled shout Carlos couldn’t quite make out across the connection, a bang, and then the background noise faded into non-existence and Oscar returned with his heavily-accented English. “Okay, we’re good. How you been?”

“I’ve been better,” Carlos answered honestly. There was little point in lying, and there’d always been a certain candor between the two of them. “How are you keeping? Still running in the same circles?”

“Not so much these days, my friend. My old man passed away last year, left me to run his shop. I help out where I can, but this is all that’s left of him now, you get me?”

“’Course I do.”

“So, let’s cut to the chase – you in trouble, brother?”

Straight down to business. It was nice to see that some things didn’t change. Carlos shifted the remaining pesetas in his hand then pushed another one into the coin slot, just in case.

“Maybe. Was hoping I could cash in on that favour you owe me?”

Oscar laughed.

“Anything for you, C. I owe you my life, I ain’t forgetting that any time soon.”

“About 700 000 pesos too, if I’m not going senile.”

More laughter, tinny and echoing.

“Let’s start with the life, yeah? Who you pissed off this time?”

“It’s a long story. You know those greener pastures I left for? Turns out it was the Soylent kind of green.”

There was a sound somewhere between a hum and a sigh.

“I saw the news,” Oscar said. “Bad luck there man – thought all the muscle got iced, so you can see why I was surprised to hear from you. Saw your mom the other week, actually. She said you were travelling round Europe with some chick – thought that was a euphemism, or she’d finally gone loco from the stress.”

“What stress?”

“Having you for a son.”

“Pendejo, you think I’m gonna stand for that shit just ‘cause I’m halfway across the world?”

Perhaps Oscar would have taken his warning more seriously had he not laughed throughout it. He couldn’t help it. There weren’t many pleasant memories he had left Colombia with but the people, the laughs, the general shooting of the shit – that, he missed a lot. Maybe he had felt that same kind of camaraderie with Barry, Rebecca, even Claire and Leon, but Chris cast a shadow over it all that no amount of light seemed able to shoo away.

“So how can I be of service?” Oscar asked once the moment had passed, and Carlos pushed another peseta into the payphone. “This got anything to do with Raccoon City?”

Carlos looked around nervously. The street was no busier than it had been when he had arrived – even Leon, sitting in a café across the street, was engrossed in something on the screen of his laptop, paying no mind to the world around him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Look, the company that picked me up, they did some bad shit. A lot of people got hurt. Lot more _will_ get hurt if we let them. I’ve been asked to testify against them, and you know what that means.”

Oscar hummed. Police protection didn’t mean shit, not from their experience. If someone like Umbrella wanted someone dead, a badge wasn’t going to stop them.

“Think you can arrange for someone to keep an eye on Ma? Abuela, too. Hell, my whole family if that isn’t too much to ask.”

“Not gonna be a problem,” Oscar promised. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t need time to think it over. “You helped a lot of people in your time here, whether you realise that or not. Maybe we don’t run the same colours no more, but that shit runs deeper.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Carlos with a sigh.

There were things he’d left behind in Colombia that he was keen to not dwell on, places he could never revisit. There were watering holes that would be too empty with the ghosts that now filled them, numbers that would never again connect to voices he could barely remember. There were villages stained with blood, roads littered with casings, graves that maybe he didn’t fill himself, but he felt responsible for all the same. It had been almost a year since he had left, and the anniversary seemed to be dragging up old memories, reminding him of the things he had moved away to forget.

He’d considered telling Jill, being open and honest with her and letting her at least flip his demons off the way she was so good at. But she was a different person these days, aloof and often cold. He wasn’t convinced that she enjoyed her time with him anymore; she would sure as hell enjoy it less if he enlightened her with the finer details of his past.

He wondered if he would look back on these days the way he did those friendlier times with old friends. When all was said and done, would he think back to this phone call, to a simpler time that seemed so out of reach?

“You were never meant for that life, man,” Oscar said. “You wanted to make a difference, maybe this is how? You hold those hijueputas accountable, show the world their true colours. Ey, maybe you settle down with this girl of yours? You always were the romantic type.”

“Maybe in another life, brother. You take care of yourself, yeah?”

“You too, C.”

The receiver dropped with a heavy _clunk_ when he replaced the handset and he counted out the remaining coins in his hand as he made his way across the street to where Leon waited. Enough for a coffee. Maybe lady luck was on his side today.

Leon had closed his laptop by the time he joined him with a steaming brew in hand, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“I gotta report all my personal calls to you now?” Carlos teased.

Leon’s raised eyebrows fell into a frown.

“You made it sound like it was something important.”

“It was. To me.”

With a shake of his head and a covert smile, Leon reached for his own coffee cup, still full despite the lack of vapour rising from it. True to suspicion, he wrinkled his nose as he took a sip – he had a habit of ordering hot drinks and then forgetting about them. He’d done it in the café they‘d sought out the day they met, after Carlos had roughed him up a little and Jill had stared daggers through him.

Of all the survivors, Leon was the one Carlos felt most comfortable around, and he doubted it had much to do with their similar age. It was the blank slate they had started with. No prejudice or expectations, no established friendships to navigate around. No suspicion. It was something he had found oddly peaceful.

“Any more news on the facility?”

“Maybe,” Leon sighed. “Carla says your contact has gone dark, which is…worrying.”

Caught, probably. They knew the risks of undercover work. But if they’d been captured, maybe they’d be questioned. That meant that if they were going to make a move it needed to be soon. Good. Carlos was itching for some action. He was sick of measuring progress in terms of paper piles and things that ‘looked promising’.

“Do we have a plan yet?”

“Part of one. Jill and I have been working on some contingencies – she’s real good at that sort of thing.”

Carlos studied him for a moment, watched as he met his gaze unflinchingly. He was a strange one. Looked younger than his years, had an undeniable air of naivety around him, but when it came to getting shit done, he pulled no punches.

It was no wonder he and Jill got on so well. They were more or less the same person, just several years and shattered hopes apart. It was easy to forget that they’d been through the same thing, that Umbrella had torn through his life as well, uprooted him and planted him somewhere new and frightening.

“I’m glad she’s got something to focus on,” he said, the words tumbling out without any real thought or motivation.

This time, he was the one being studied. Leon’s blue eyes bored into him, flitted in the direction of the payphone he had vacated. He sighed, closed his eyes, and then shook his head lightly. Carlos wasn’t great at reading people, always believed in being clear and open and honest and didn’t have time for those that played games, but he could tell that something had made him uncomfortable.

“It was an old friend,” he said, not without a measure of frustration. “In Colombia. I asked him to look out for my family.”

Leon seemed surprised by this sudden reveal of information.

“We can get them protection,” Leon said. “Bring them to the US, if that’s what it takes.”

Carlos laughed at the thought of this.

“Ma only leaves Colombia for family events and special occasions,” he said. “You’ll have better luck getting Spencer to ‘fess up. And no offense but where I’m from government protection don’t mean shit.”

“It won’t be government. Special ops, unofficial, no-one will even know they’re there. Not even the Colombian government.”

Carlos drummed his fingers against the table, considered it for a moment.

“If you want to station someone, go ahead,” he said at last. “But I’d feel better with people I know watching over them. People I trust.”

“I get that.” There was a long pause as Leon stared down at the table before him. “That why you followed Jill?”

This time it was Carlos that was hit with the unexpected. He sat up in his chair, scratched the back of his head, tried to hide the sudden twinge in his gut.

“Where’s this come from?”

Leon shrugged.

“Guy like you, coming all this way when there’s groups like yours Stateside, even some in South America. Moving further away from your family, from everything you know. Seems like more than following a lead to me.”

“Jill doesn’t need protection,” he said. “I wanted to help take Umbrella down, she asked me to come with her. Had to start somewhere, I figured this wasn’t so bad a place.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Leon could see that too.

“You love her?”

Carlos laughed, but failed to convince even himself.

“We’re too broken for love,” he said. Another half-truth. “The hell does someone like me know about that sort of thing, anyway?”

Leon didn’t respond to that, but he did give out a little huff of a sigh, almost a sign of reflection. It made Carlos wonder for a moment, but he decided that whatever it was really wasn’t any of his damn business.

* * *

**January 25 th, 1999. 20:46.**

They all had their own ways of dealing with the status quo. Rebecca liked to pore through her books in-between trawling through university prospectuses and Masters applications; Barry wrote letters to his family, most of which he would never send; Chris smoked; Leon would tap away on his laptop until he read something that pissed him off a little too much, at which point he would slam it closed and pick a random TV channel to pretend he was watching or make his excuses and retreat to his hotel. Carlos and Jill, however, would take ‘walks’, ‘naps’ and any other code that they were under no illusion of the others buying.

That was exactly where they found themselves that night, tangled in their clothes on the floor of their bedroom. They hadn’t made it to the bed, hadn’t even made it out of their clothing. She hadn’t even wanted anything from this, just the aggression of the act and a short time where she could hand control to someone she trusted and not need to worry about anything. It was catharsis, not romance, but he had insisted on making it worth her while with his fucking chivalry, and now she was warm in the glow of something that felt dangerous and even more out of her control. It was a trade-off she was beginning to debate the value of. But damn if it didn’t feel good.

“You ok?”

She opened her eyes to see him looking down at her, the thick waves of his hair plastered against his forehead with sweat.

“Yeah,” she panted back. “That was…good.”

He laughed at this.

“That’s good for my ego,” he said appreciatively. “You just looked…like I’d lost you for a moment there. You sure you’re ok?”

It didn’t matter how good she felt. It didn’t matter that she still languished somewhere in satisfied docility, that he always looked more handsome somehow after the act, or even that he was still inside her and this kind of closeness reached levels that transcended physical. The moment was gone.

She pushed against him and he moved immediately, looking a little lost.

“I need to…clean up,” she said, and moved with haste towards the bathroom. One arm still stuck out of the T-shirt that was now bunched up around her neck, and her bra dangled uselessly from the other shoulder. Even her panties were still around one ankle and she almost tripped over them on the way. It was just how these things happened, but today it came with an extra layer of embarrassment. It wasn’t something she was used to.

“You would have had me convinced if you’d tried to bullshit it,” Carlos called from back in the bedroom as she freshened herself up. “The fact that you didn’t even try has me worried.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to worry about me?” she shouted back.

“You did, but apparently I don’t listen.”

Her fists clenched against the porcelain of the sink. One argument, one wrong thing said, and he was going to hold that against her?

“And what’s this?” she challenged as she emerged to retrieve her pyjamas. “Me saying I’m okay and you not listening.”

Tension peaked, the air thick with the kind of static that never led anywhere good. His arms dropped to his side, head tilted to the ceiling and he let out a huff of air through his nose.

“Can we not argue right now?” she pleaded.

“Fine,” he said.

And that was that. She had learned quickly that Carlos didn’t like arguing. If there was a way of resolving something without aggression, he was all for it. It infuriated her. Sometimes, she just wanted to scream and shout, wanted him to give her a reason to be angry at him, motivation to walk away and stew.

She was looking for something, and though she thought she knew what, she was loathe to acknowledge it, to recognise it for what it was.

Jill curled her fingers into fists to still the tremor she felt coming.

It all led back to that night, to the nightmare that had seen the others reach out with well-meaning sympathy that just rubbed her the wrong way.

She saw him every time she walked through the kitchen, dead on the tiles, shot and crushed beneath the heel of _her_ enemy. If she told him the truth of what she had seen, he would claim it was simply PTSD, that her brain was working up worst-case scenarios, bringing her fears to life, and that she had nothing to worry about now that she was awake. But she did. Because it might have been the worst case scenario but hadn’t the last year of her life been filled with those?

Slowly, she was realising a truth that hurt as much to consider as it would to execute – this needed to end. Them. They needed to separate and untangle themselves from this web of feelings while they still could.

She was exhausted, and she dropped down onto the edge of the bed, weighed down by her thoughts. She had been here before, back in his cousin’s farmhouse in rural Ohio, talking herself out of inviting him with her. So convinced was she that all she needed was a quick fuck, an itch scratched. But she’d caught feelings somewhere in that isolation and there he was, someone who truly seemed to _get_ her, someone she would have thrown herself at with all her might had they met a few months earlier than they did. She had always accepted that this was a possibility, that she would fall in deep, but with that acceptance had come the hope that when it happened she would be ready for it.

With something that resembled hesitance, she glanced over her shoulder and just like that her resolve melted away. Carlos held himself in a way maybe no other would have questioned; squared shoulders, determined movements, his lips fixed in a straight line. She knew better.

“Hey,” she whispered, and reached her hand out towards him over the mattress.

He looked at her, then lightly shook his head and continued to flip his T-shirt the right way out. Then, he paused, lowered himself onto the bed, as close to the edge of the mattress as he could get, and sighed. It wasn’t a victory, or a defeat – it was a compromise.

“Do you still want this?” he asked.

Jill looked inside of her, knew the answer but something closed in her throat, held the words back,, like if loosed they would go straight for the heart and he’d be as good as dead.

“What?” she settled for, her voice coming out in a strangled whisper.

“Because I’m startin’ to think that maybe you don’t. You’re hot and cold, Jill, always have been. It’s who you are, and I get that. It’s why I- It’s part of what makes you _you_ and I’d never ask you to change. But lately I’m feeling like I’m freezing to death out here. I told you, whatever you’re ready for us to be, I’m cool with that, I just need to know where I stand.”

The hand she had extended towards him retracted.

This was the chance she had been waiting for, wasn’t it? She could lie, tell him that no, she didn’t want this, and that would be it. They’d agreed to stop the moment this didn’t work anymore, to put it on hold if it started to interfere with their mission. He would be expecting it. Should be.

But she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him about something like that, even if it was merciful. And at the same time she couldn’t tell him that yes, she wanted this, wanted to wake up in his arms every day believing the world was a little brighter than it actually was. Because that was a fantasy, and there was no room for that in this world.

“Together,” she whispered, quietly enough that perhaps he didn’t hear, so she raised her voice, repeated it with more clarity. “ _Together_. That’s where _we_ stand.”

If she had expected him to leave she was let down. Instead, he pushed himself back onto the bed, lay down with his head propped up against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling.

“That how we’re going into this trial?”

She swallowed thickly.

“Of course.” A pause, a moment’s contemplation. “If not together then I’m not sure I can do it at all, not after last time.”

“You act all tough, you know,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice before she joined him, a respectful distance left between them. “Like you’ve got something to prove to the world. But you don’t. Even Supercop has to air out her cape sometimes. Let herself be human.”

This was why she needed him, wasn’t it? He wasn’t fooled by the bravado, didn’t think she was indestructible. But he never treated her like she was fragile, always gave her the space to do what she needed to and was there waiting to catch her if she tripped.

She had no response for him, so she smiled, reached over to run a hand along his thick bicep and he let her.

“I’m heading back downstairs,” she said. “You coming?”

“Maybe in a while.”

Before she left, she leaned over to kiss him, not sure what she hoped to achieve with it. Something lingered in the air, just past the point of conversation. He hadn’t bought her bullshit, but he wasn’t calling her out on it either. This would come back to haunt her, and she resolved that when it did she would be better prepared.

Maybe then she’d be as brave as he seemed to think she was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~Translations~~
> 
> “¡Carlos, parcero! ¡Pense que estabas muerto!” – “Carlos, my man! I thought you were dead!”
> 
> “No eres tan afortunado” – “You’re not that lucky.”


	5. Ricochet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wasn’t a violent man by nature, but his fight or flight instinct was honed to perfection and he knew which side was screaming at him right now. Weeks’ worth of frustration and insomnia coalesced into a fury that was almost blind. He wouldn’t make the first move, but he was on edge, prepared to make the last.
> 
> ~~
> 
> All unattended pots boil over eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are maybe just under halfway through now! I say that, but all of this build up was only meant to be 1/3 of the story so we shall see haha. This is honestly the chapter I've been most nervous about and until I started on Chapter 6 was the hardest to write (I hope this isn't a trend!) so this is both the most excited and nervous I've been about posting so far! I hope you enjoy it, as always please let me know if you do/don't :). Thank you so much to everyone who read last chapter, especially those of you that came back for this one and those who left a comment and/or a kudos :).
> 
> I promised you all a treat, and you’re gonna get one – a quite frankly awesome illustration for this chapter courtesy of the amazingly talented **jeannedarcprice**! Girl, you have been the driving force behind me getting through my wobbles with this fic, and this illustration is honestly just the best, thank you so much. Go check out her art on Tumblr (jeannedarcprice) and also her Valeveira fics on here (same username) and show her some love!

**January 27 th, 1999.**

His grandmother liked to tell stories, the kind no child liked to hear. She was a traditional woman, had grown up in near poverty in a village in rural Colombia, and when she met her husband and moved to the city, she had brought the folklore of her youth with her. El Coco was one of her favourites – young Carlos had been warned many a time that one day Coco would come, and Carlos had better hope that he’d been good enough when he did. His father scolded her for scaring his poor, impressionable son and though the child had always shrugged it off, that fear remained in his young mind until more real, palpable fears had manifested.

Those tales would return to him later in life, as he slept beneath a canopy of stars, campfire burning as one of their group took position as watchman. They would sometimes trek through the jungle for days, anything to remain undetected. This world wasn’t theirs, and its natives would cry out every hour of the day and night. Listen closely enough and you might just fool yourself that something else lurked in the darkness. He could see how those tales were born, evolving from the primal fear that every man held.

Despite agreeing with his father in his youth, his mother warned him of La Llorana often, usually as she kissed him farewell as he ran to play with his friends.

“Be home before dark,” she would tell him. “Or the lady in white might find you.”

The day his father was taken from him, there were screams and cries in the night. He was never certain which belonged to his mother, which to his grandmother, and which to him. It wasn’t quite the white woman, but wails had heralded that death all the same, had brought it to their family with teeth and claws. He stopped believing in demons and monsters that day. Men were wicked enough.

And then Raccoon City had happened. A metropolis populated by creatures even his vivid imagination couldn’t dream up. Monsters that had once been human…and others that still were.

When he closed his eyes now, he saw them, unable to erect that mental barrier ten-year-old Carlos had. These monsters were real. All of them. But in that circle of hell he had met good people too, people who wanted to make a difference. People he wanted to protect.

Jill was one of them.

The moment he had heard her scream through the still of night in Northern Spain he thought only of La Llorana, of the death knell she sang. He didn’t know why, but it had set him even further on edge in the days that would follow. Jill wouldn’t talk about her nightmare, or whatever else it had been that had brought them all to her bedside that night. Every time he touched upon it she would pale and then push him away. They had argued more in the week since then than they had in the three months that preceded it.

Something had happened, and now she was a closed book, shutting out everyone but Chris. Perfect Chris, who could do no wrong.

Even today, she had decided to work out without him for the first time since their arrival. He was sleeping, she had said, and she didn’t want to wake him, but he didn’t buy it. Talking to her was a futile effort though, so he had no choice other than to hum an ‘ok’ and let it slide.

The nightmares and then the rejection had been a rough start to a day that had just continued to go downhill. He’d resolved to go for a walk only for it to start raining as soon as he had laced up his shoes. Then, as he figured a drive into town for a haircut might do him some good, the clouds had darkened, and a sonorous clap of thunder put an end that that plan too.

By mid-afternoon, he began to itch for something to do. Jill and Leon were working through some intel the group had received on ‘Facility 23’ and were hammering out strategies amidst a flurry of paperwork on the dining table. The others seemed content with daytime television they couldn’t understand – Claire claimed this was ‘study’, he was convinced it had something to do with the handsome protagonist of some drama she had stumbled across.

So, he dug a pair of black shorts and a black vest out of the pile of clean laundry neither he nor Jill had thought to tidy away yet, tied his hair back out of his eyes, and made his way to the home gym just off the living room.

Fitness had always been a catharsis for him. When he was sixteen, he had found himself grounded for what was neither the first nor last time, sporting a black eye and bruised fists. He hadn’t fallen into a fight in some time, not since his sophomore year, but it was a violent enough one that he would have been facing a suspension had it not broken out just metres from school property. It didn’t matter that the other kid had jumped him, or that decidedly racist remarks had been thrown around by some prick in a sweater vest who thought Carlos had looked at his girl wrong – the other guy had come out looking far worse and that’s all his aunt and uncle could see. It was his cousin that had bundled him into the back of his car when he was meant to be babysitting one night and driven him to a gym on the other side of town, telling him that if he was going to fight then he should at least learn to fight properly. It had been harder to keep up with classes when he enlisted at the age of eighteen, so weights and some occasional boxing had become his favoured stress relief and it had sort of stuck in the four years that followed.

It was lucky, really, that they had found a house with a gym – a major selling point when the tourists rolled in each summer, apparently. It wasn’t fantastic but it had weights and a couple benches, even a treadmill which confused the hell out of him given the country roads that stretched for miles around them.

Barry usually hit the weights around mid-afternoon so he approached with expectations, wondering if he could talk the older man into spotting for him. But when he walked through the door and saw him already spotting for Chris, he stopped in his tracks.

For a moment, Carlos considered turning on his heel and waiting for a time he could enjoy the solace he sought but pride rooted him to the spot. All he had was the higher ground, as dizzying as it was sometimes. So, he did what he does best – approached an awkward situation with humour.

“Room for one more?” he asked.

Chris, who had looked up upon him entering only for his smile to immediately fade, rose to his feet with averted eyes and reached for his kit.

“Actually, I was just leaving.”

Any other day, maybe Carlos would have let him walk past, towel and water bottle in hand. Maybe he would have rolled his eyes, made a sarcastic comment to Barry once Chris was out of earshot and began his routine feeling frustrated but unsurprised.

But today had been a joke and the anxiety that had kept every nerve on edge for the last week ensured there was little room left for the one Chris Redfield was trying to hop on. So, as he approached, eyes on the door, Carlos stepped to the right and blocked his path with a shoulder.

“What’s your problem?” he asked, his voice adopting a tone of hardness that was only half-intended.

Barry looked up from where he had begun to wipe down the equipment.

“Problem? No problem here, just heading for the shower.” There was a smug quality to Chris’s voice that grated on him, stoked the fire. Nah, he wasn’t having this. Not this time.

“You know what I mean. I walk into a room, you walk out. I say something, you roll your eyes or have some smart-ass comeback. I try to be helpful, you’re condescending. Feels like I’m back in fucking high school.”

Chris looked up at him, his jaw set, a cold fire in his eyes.

“So, what if I do have a problem?” he asked.

“Chris,” Barry warned in a low baritone, but neither of the younger men paid him any heed.

“Then maybe we should talk it out, like adults.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you. Now move aside.”

Carlos considered it. He heard Jill’s sharp voice urging him to just drop it. But why should he? She hadn’t been doing a damn thing about this prick, and she expected him to just stand by and take blow after blow? He was sick of being a damn martyr and if this was a hill Chris insisted on dying on then so be it, he’d hand him the fucking gun.

“Not until we talk this out,” he said. Their eyes locked now, and it was clear that Chris was no closer to backing down than he was. “You think this is fair on Jill, being stuck in the middle of this? Or Claire?”

A flash of something feral passed across Chris’s grey eyes.

“Don’t you ever talk about my sister,” he threatened. “You think I don’t know your game? It’s bad enough you’ve got Jill fooled, but don’t think for a second you have a place here. The moment you show your true colours your ass is as good as dead, you get me?”

It all clicked into place. So that was it? Chris thought his colours were red and white? Carlos laughed, and it didn’t go down well judging from the sudden tensing of Chris’s shoulders. Was he really so dense that he thought this was a long con, that he’d wormed his way into Jill’s bed as some sort of sleeper agent? And here he was, thinking there was jealousy, that Chris had been eyeing Jill as a dick warmer and he’d just gotten in the way.

“You think I’m still working for Umbrella? Really, Chris, paranoia like that isn’t healthy.”

“Come on, guys,” Barry interjected. He was still keeping his distance but had ceased his cleaning and was observing them like one would observe an unexploded firework. “There’s a lot of testosterone in the air, I get it. Just play nice.”

Chris turned to him, looking for help he wasn’t going to get.

“I can’t believe you trust this guy,” Chris said. “He comes out of nowhere and you all welcome him with open arms?”

Barry shrugged helplessly, not quite knowing what to say.

Carlos could feel his blood run hotter, felt a rage he hadn’t known in years burn its way through his veins. He wasn’t a violent man by nature, but his fight or flight instinct was honed to perfection and he knew which side was screaming at him right now. Weeks’ worth of frustration and insomnia coalesced into a fury that was almost blind. He wouldn’t make the first move, but he was on edge, prepared to make the last.

That’s how it had always been – don’t wait around for others, don’t expect to be saved. Fight your own battles and fight them tooth and nail. If you crawl out the other side bloodied and bruised then so be it, so long as you crawled out alive.

“How am I any different from Cassandra?” Carlos asked. “Miguel? Any of the others with Umbrella money to their name?”

“You were _manning guns_ for them,” Chris growled. “You spent months training with them, and for what? Riot control? A rescue mission? Nah, I don’t buy it.”

There was no winning here. It was a classic unstoppable force meets unmovable object situation and as riled up as he was, Carlos began to realise that maybe he didn’t have the energy or strength of mind to deal with this after all, not today.

“I’d never make her choose between us,” he said, looking at the wall somewhere over Chris’s shoulder. “But if this continues it’s going to get to the point where she might feel she has to.”

It might have been a low blow, but it was the truth. He didn’t know what he had expected, but Chris squared up to him now, focused in his anger.

“Could be,” he agreed. “But what makes you think she’d pick you?”

It shouldn’t have hurt. It was something he had given consideration to, something he had tried to make peace with. He had come real close too, fooling himself into believing that it would never really come to that. But now…he wasn’t sure of anything when it came to her.

“Even without Umbrella, what are you?” Chris sneered, latching on to his silence, using it as a knife to twist. “A mercenary? Lost soldier? _Terrorist_?”

Something snapped, just above his diaphragm. Before he even knew what he was doing, Carlos had closed the gap between them, drawing up his height like a warning shot.

“Hey!” Barry cried. There was a rumble back in the direction of the living room but all Carlos could hear was the blood pounding in his ears.

“Shouldn’t talk about shit you know _nothing about_!” he roared. He heard the door behind them open but didn’t react. To Chris’s credit, he didn’t back down, and they stood, almost forehead to forehead, glaring at one another, horns locked in an act of aggression neither seemed sure how (or if) to follow up on.

“What are you gonna do about it?”

“Push me and find out.”

There was little difference in their height but next to Carlos Chris was lean and almost boyish in his musculature. Maybe that’s what brought him to huff, to relax his shoulders and step back; not quite a white flag, but not a red one either.

“Fuck it,” he said in a low whisper.

“That’s what I thought,” said Carlos, apparently unable to let him have the last say. “ _Pathetic_.”

Carlos didn’t know what came first, the explosion of pain, the cries, or the sudden darkening of his vision. What he was sure of was that Chris punched like he fucking meant it. His head snapped back and before he had even started to right himself he could feel a pool of warmth trickling down onto his top lip. Almost by instinct he raised an arm defensively, but Barry was already between them, pushing Chris back towards the equipment he had not long ago vacated.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” he heard the older man roar.

A low pitched whine seemed to ricochet off the walls as Carlos swiped at his nose with a fist. It came away bloody and as he processed this, blinking at the red stain against his skin, a gentle hand appeared on his bicep.

Jill looked up at him in shock, and a for a moment he felt something beneath the maelstrom of rage, fear and sadness that had kept him so strung up recently. But then, the storm descended, and he pulled his arm away, swiping again at his face as he left the chaos that had unfolded behind him.

When he found the bathroom, he took one look in the mirror and laughed. Blood, more than seemed reasonable, ran from his nose, over his lips and into his beard. The copper tang it left behind caused his stomach to lurch briefly, though it wasn’t a taste he was unfamiliar with. He set about prodding and pinching the bridge of his nose and when he was satisfied that nothing was broken, he ran cold water into his hands and splashed it on his face. There was bruising already, a small cut on the side of his nose and his left eyelid had begun to swell. All from one punch. Chris really hadn’t been holding back. He would have been concerned if it didn’t amuse him so much.

After a few minutes, when he was drying off his beard in a towel that now bore an abstract pinkish pattern, Jill appeared in the mirror behind him. This time she observed, and her brow furrowed as she took in the bruising on his face.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

He made another swipe at his beard with the towel, dismayed when a couple fresh droplets of crimson were visible against the white.

“Nothing’s broken,” he said. “Hell of a nosebleed though.”

“What the hell happened? We heard shouting, then… What did you say to him?”

The whining returned, and he bit back a rising lump of hot anger in his throat.

“This is my fault then?”

Jill balked.

“What? No, I never said that.”

“Because it must have been something I said, not the fact that your friend is in fact a fucking animal.”

She looked at him, breathed in through her nose.

“Chris has anger issues, yes,” she agreed diplomatically. “But I think that’s unfair.”

He laughed again, unable to help himself. There was blood on his vest too – he’d missed that. Where the hell had it all come from?

“Yeah,” he said softly as he peeled off his vest. “I’m the one being unfair.”

“Then tell me what happened.”

He wanted to say that he shouldn’t have to explain himself to her, but it felt past that point. And that worried him. Jill had always been at his side, even if she wasn’t on it, but these days he felt incredibly alone.

“He called me a terrorist,” he said, unable to hold back another laugh. Maybe he was losing his mind? “But maybe that’s fair.”

Jill said nothing, just gaped speechless at the space he had occupied as he pushed past her and made for their bedroom, shirt balled up in one hand and towel in the other. Had she not expected Chris to be capable of words so cutting? Perhaps she had thought him a more rational man than he clearly was? Carlos found it difficult to reconcile the picture she had painted of him from the chalk on the sidewalk that was the reality.

He was halfway into a new T-shirt and all the way into a pair of jeans when Jill joined him. She drifted in like she was made of air, closed the door silently behind her, and then leaned against it with eyes closed.

“I am so sorry,” she said. He’d never seen her truly angry, but the tremor in her voice told him that she had both hands on some sort of rein right now. “He had no right to say that.”

Carlos almost made a sarcastic comment but decided against it. A sudden drop of warmth against his left nostril brought a fingertip to rest against his moustache and though it came away a little less red than before he still swore as he sought out the ensuite and the roll of toilet paper that waited within.

When he had dabbed the blood away and looked up into the mirror she was there again, like a pale shadow, hugging her arms and looking meeker than he had ever seen her.

“I didn’t mean to imply you’d done something wrong,” she said. “You showed a lot of restraint not hitting him back.”

Satisfied that he wouldn’t soil another shirt, Carlos turned to face her, leaning back against the sink. He studied her for a moment, and just for that moment the storm within him calmed. His face ached to all hell but somehow it hurt a little less looking at her.

He wanted to just take her into his arms, hold on to her long enough that things started to feel right again, and forget everything, push it aside so it was tomorrow’s problem. But he was sick of doing that, sick of making excuses, sick of pretending everything was okay just because it was her.

“Feel like that’s all I’ve done,” he said. “Show restraint. He thinks I’m still working for Umbrella, by the way.”

It was sad, really, the paranoia. He had seen it tear men apart, turn them against their friends and allies, leaving them with nothing but their own misery. He’d never been this close to it before.

“He doesn’t trust easily. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

He could have left it there, could have huffed and just let it slide. But whatever it was that had brought him to finally take a stand, to not be content in tiptoeing around Chris and his issues, reared its head and suddenly he felt braver than he had in weeks.

“It’s kind of hard not to,” he said, his voice an unintentional growl. “Especially now he’s made it clear that it is personal. And what about you, huh? You’re the only one who hasn’t said a damn thing to him. Does it not bother you? Is that it?”

“Of course it bothers me! I want the two of you to get along.”

“Then fucking _say something_. ‘Cause next time, I’m not gonna show so much restraint.”

He pushed away from the sink and reached for the door behind her, and she stepped aside to let him pass. The walls were beginning to close in, and this damn headache was just getting worse – he needed some air. Outside, the rain continued to fall, but the thunder had abated. It would have made for a refreshing walk if only the clouds would part.

“Why do I have to be the one to say something?” he heard Jill say behind him. He turned, and her arms were no longer crossed. Whatever meekness had settled in, it was now nowhere to be seen. “You’re a grown man, Carlos, try talking it out with him.”

Was he hearing her right?

“Talk to him?” he laughed. “I just did! Look where that got me. You’re the only one he listens to around here. Claire’s tearing him a new one downstairs and what did you do? You came after me to ask what I had said. It’s clear whose side you’re on, so stop trying to be diplomatic when it’s clear you just don’t give a shit.”

“If I didn’t give a shit I wouldn’t have asked you to come with me! I would have just walked away after Raccoon City and that would have been it.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Someone had been passing outside in the hallway, and as his voice rang out the footsteps ceased, then a moment later could be heard softer, slower, then thudded back down the stairs.

Jill looked like a deer in headlights. This wasn’t her. This wasn’t the woman he had left America, even Paris, with. Something had changed. Wesker? They’d all reacted badly to the news of his survival, but Jill especially had harboured a simmering fury. It was _personal_ , she had said. A _vendetta_. Is that what this was? Because he had seen her stare down monsters without blinking yet here she was, a bundle of chaos – this was not the Jill Valentine he knew.

His mind traveled back to the previous evening, to something he had said – and something she had not.

“You never answered my question,” he said when she didn’t answer. His mouth ran dry, and the words felt rough against his tongue. “Do you want this? Us?”

He had thought about letting that particular sleeping dog lie, but he couldn’t pretend any more. Not for the sake of a relationship that had become little more than sex and secrets.

“Yes,” she said. And she meant it. She wasn’t great at lying, not to him.

Just like that, a weight lifted off his chest, but it lifted slowly, tentatively. Then, her eyes closed tightly, the corners of her lips twisted downwards, and her face contorted in an expression of pain that slipped past her control.

“But…?” he breathed, his chest tightening.

Her eyes opened, filled with tears that did not fall.

“But we can’t have this,” she said. “We…we need to stop.”

It wasn’t so much a rug that had been swept from beneath him as the bottom falling out of his world. He didn’t even grab for purchase, just let everything rush past him, resigned himself to the fall, not caring what awaited him at the bottom.

“Why?”

Of all the words he could have spoken, they formed a question he knew would destroy him whatever the answer.

“There’s too much at stake,” Jill said quietly. “We need to focus on what’s ahead. The facility, the court case, whatever comes after that. No distractions.”

The moment she started talking her eyes flitted downwards, her nose wrinkled just a little, and he saw her fingertips pull at the fabric of her sweater.

She was lying.

“Don’t bullshit me,” he pleaded. “If this has to end it has to end, but at least be honest with me, Jill. Tell me why. After everything we’ve been through together you owe me that much.”

Tears fell now, but they did not prick the usual urge within him to pull her close and kiss them away. He watched her fight with herself, dig her fingers into her arms so hard now it had to hurt. Then, she met his eyes again.

“I told you. We never should have gotten into this. We need to be more focused.”

He stared back, watching her raise a hand to casually swipe a tear away with an indifferent thumb. But that hand shook, those lips twisted down of their own accord, and there was a hurt deep in her eyes that he couldn’t reconcile with what he saw.

The pain that tore through him wasn’t the cauterising kind. It wasn’t something that closed itself up neatly, stung but allowed you to carry on. It was heartbreak, the kind he thought he’d felt before, but truth was that nothing came remotely close. He loved her, fiercely, wholly. And he was alright with her not loving him back, but he’d at least thought that she’d cared. But she didn’t. She didn’t even care enough to tell him the truth, hid her true self behind a lie that felt half-assed at best.

“Carlos-,” she said, soft enough that he might have forgiven her if an apology followed.

But he didn’t give her the chance, just raised a hand to silence her, unable to even look at her anymore. When he left, she did not follow, and the silence that welcomed his entrance to the living room followed him still as he grabbed his shoes and stepped out into the rain.

* * *

Jerome Sadler was dying. Maybe his body didn’t know it yet, but by his estimates he had enough supplies to drag his survival out maybe a few more days. If the other guy hadn’t left in a genuinely misguided attempt to get help, they’d be fighting over their last granola bar that very morning.

He’d lost count of the days since the shutters had sealed and the door lock had ceased to function. The only way in or out of the guards’ rec room was a route that took them down into the lab and fuck that. This whole lockdown could only mean one thing, so going into the lab was only a more certain albeit quicker road to one’s end. Instead, Jerome worked on the locks. He’d been a security consultant back in the day, before he’d uncovered a little too much on a job for a certain company and his eyes had been forced wide open. Electronic locks were things he had been routinely paid to break, it was his job to know how they worked and how to make them not work so they could be built to work better. But this damn thing… Two pins were loose, but he had made zero progress on the third and fourth in almost twenty-four hours and the hunger was starting to affect his concentration. Even if he did make it out, it was at least an hour-long trek through the valley before he made it to a main road.

He’d turned his attention to repairing a broken PDA left behind by some hapless scientist. At the very least, if he could repair that and crack the likely pathetic password the guy had set, the others would at least find some evidence with his body.

With a morning spent trawling through the security console and pulling anything that seemed useful, he started on the lock again in the afternoon, hoping to turn his attention back to the PDA later that evening and then passing out and getting some hopefully refreshing sleep.

The third pin gave way at about 4pm, and he sobbed into the cold metal of the door. One more to go…

The other guard, a burly meathead of a man, made it all the way to the third level. It wasn’t hunger that got him in the end, nor dehydration. It was a man he had exchanged pleasantries with barely six hours before the lockdown. He’d asked how his wife was and replied with ‘I’m working on it’ when the question was fired back at him. He’d accepted the donuts he had been so kind as to bring in and even shared them with Jerome. So when the man approached him, dragging his feet and burbling like a drunk, he’d not sensed any danger, had let his guard drop so low that the wet sound of flesh against the tiled floor and his own scream were the last things he ever heard.


	6. People Like Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "These things, they…they aren’t built for a world like ours. For people like us."

**January 30 th, 1999**.

Jill was always confident in her decisions. Maybe they weren’t always right or fair, but they were always necessary, and she would stand by them until the end. Things changed, regrets wormed their way in, but making tough decisions was just part of her line of work and she had learned to own them, good and bad. It was a mindset she applied to her personal life, too, and so far in her twenty-four years, it had worked in her favour.

But this…

She’d never watched a man’s heart break before. She didn’t doubt that she’d caused one or two fractures in her time, but never before had she seen something shatter so spectacularly. It wasn’t something to be proud of, wasn’t something she wanted to remember, but she couldn’t forget, couldn’t file it under ‘necessary evils’ and move on. Carlos was strong, he was resilient. Maybe he swayed from time to time, but he never fell, never crumpled; he just dusted himself off and moved on.

But not this time.

The look on his face haunted her, and though she’d expected the guilt to fade as each day passed, it did not. If anything, it grew, and the confidence she had felt would come with time eluded her still.

He had barely spoken to her since their fight. She had woken alone the next morning, and it was Claire who had nervously entered the bedroom to say that she had offered to switch rooms with Carlos, and was she okay sharing with her? That was when the reality had sunk in. She didn’t really expect him to want to share a bed with her anymore – it was hardly appropriate – but it felt like another inch on an incredibly long band-aid that nobody seemed in any rush to remove.

_“I’m sorry,” she said. It was enough for him to stop, to stare down into the bag he was packing. “I…didn’t want it to be like this.”_

_He let out a little incredulous laugh and continued to shove the last of his clothes into the black sports bag._

_“This doesn’t mean we can’t talk. We’re still friends. Aren’t we?”_

_“Jill, I don’t know what we are. And I don’t have the energy to figure that out right now.”_

Maybe if she’d had the guts to tell him the truth, he’d still be able to look her in the eye.

She looked out over the river before her, watched the gentle flow of the water, let the breeze rouge her cheeks. The fence she leaned on creaked precariously, but she paid it no mind. Because someone was watching her. And when soft footfall sounded on the grass behind her she turned to face them.

“You’re gonna miss lunch,” Chris said.

Jill looked at him, cozy in a thick bomber jacket, seemingly unperturbed by the cold. She was still angry at him. Furious, even. Carlos didn’t show his face much around the house, chose instead to spend his days helping Leon or Carla in preparations for whatever lay ahead, but every time he did he brought the reminder of the other fight with him. The bruise around his eye had begun to yellow at the edges, and the swelling was long since gone, but it was there all the same. Chris’s knuckles had already healed, from a paltry shade of pink to the usual beige.

Chris sighed, shoved his hands into his pockets and looked off down the river for a moment before he met her eyes again.

“How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?”

“Try one more, we’ll see how it goes.”

Chris did not react. He could apologise another twenty times and it wouldn’t be enough, because he didn’t actually mean a single one of them. In his eyes, Carlos was still the enemy. It didn’t matter that it was a petty reason for a punch, it was the fact that he thought low enough of him that he hadn’t thought twice.

“What’s done is done, Jill,” he said. “I can’t take it back any more than he can take back whatever the fuck he said to you.”

She considered slapping him. Maybe even a good old closed-fisted right hook. But while it might make her feel better for a second, there had been enough chaos and violence in the last few days and there had to come a time where she stopped being mad at him.

“Why do you always think the worst of people?” she asked.

“I don’t. Just him.”

“You know what, Chris? Fuck you.”

She didn’t have the energy for this, for him.

“Hey!” Chris called as she walked away, not sure where she was going but wholly unable to remain where she was. “I’m sorry.”

She stopped. He meant it this time, just enough that it was another chip in the dam she was barely holding up.

“I didn’t think he’d hold you responsible for my actions. I never meant for you to get hurt.”

Jill laughed.

“I called it off, not him,” she said. Then, she laughed again, dismayed to find that this time it came with tears. “Been meaning to for a while. These things, they…they aren’t built for a world like ours. For people like us.”

She refused to turn to him, to let him see her like that. It wasn’t the first time she had cried in front of him, but this was different. It wasn’t grief or the lingering echoes of terror – she was crying over a man, over a mistake she had made and the price they were both paying for it.

Lost in the same script she repeated over and over to convince herself of the necessity of the pain, she did not see Chris approach her. Somewhere along the line she had forgotten that he was harder to fool than Carlos sometimes, that their connection may not have been a romantic one, but it ran just as deep.

So, when he pulled her into his arms, she sank willingly and let the last of her tears run down the smooth nylon of his jacket.

“Hey,” he soothed. “You know crying makes me uncomfortable. You can just slap me, you know? Think I’d prefer it if you did that.”

She dug a fist into his ribs but didn’t move, kept her head against his chest and selfishly took what comfort she could. In return, he chuckled softly and kissed the top of her head.

“Did he buy it too?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m assuming you fed him the same bullshit you just gave me.”

Even against the heat of his body, she felt a chill. She pulled back, slowly, to see him looking down at her, wearing that ridiculous expression he reserved only for the most serious of matters.

“It’s not bullshit,” she argued.

“Look me in the eye and say it again, then.”

She looked…and faltered.

“Fuck’s sake,” she complained, and pushed him away roughly. “You’re worse than he is. And what happened to him being the enemy, huh? I’d have thought you’d be happy about this?”

“I’m not happy you’re in pain, Jill,” Chris said, offended at the mere suggestion. “I think he’s bad news, and I’m glad you dumped his ass, but I never want to see you hurt. Why the hell do you think it took me so long to swing for him?”

It was a joke, and he smirked to reinforce that, but she didn’t appreciate it.

Chris would understand, her brain told her. He always did, and he was always honest with her if he disagreed or if she’d fucked up. Even as she spoke, it occurred to her that maybe she didn’t want that honesty, didn’t want to risk hearing that the mistake wasn’t the part she thought it was, but if she didn’t open up to _someone_ , if she didn’t vent her emotions just a little, she was sure the pressure would cripple her.

“I told you about the subway, how the Nemesis derailed it?”

Chris nodded silently.

“It wasn’t quite that simple,” she said, voice catching in her throat. “There was a car filled with civilians and it tore its way through them to get to me. Mikhail – the UBCS captain, he pulled me back, told me to run, and he blew himself up to destroy it.” She paused, swallowed, steeled herself against the flood of guilt. “After Carlos administered the vaccine, he had help watching over me – another UBCS solider, Tyrell. We entered the lab together and the Nemesis tore him apart just because he was in its way. It was only looking for me, Chris, and all those people died because I put them in harm’s way. I’m not doing the same to Carlos. I’m not putting a target on his back.”

Saying the words aloud was not cathartic. It was the solidification of a fear she had only considered in brief, abstract thoughts and long, nauseating nightmares.

“If he is as innocent as you say he is, he already has one,” Chris pointed out in an attempt at diplomacy. “That’s got nothing to do with you.”

“He’s not on Wesker’s radar yet.”

Realisation dawned upon her partner and his lips parted in a silent gasp. Eyes scrunched shut, nose wrinkled. She wasn’t sure if he wanted to shout or puke.

“Jill, don’t do that,” he pleaded. “By all means leave this guy in the trash, but don’t cut yourself off from happiness because of that asshole. Don’t let that paranoia eat you alive.”

“You would do the same for Claire if you could.”

“Don’t bring her into this. This isn’t protecting your family, Jill; this is survivor’s guilt. This isn’t healthy. People die, it’s not always fair. Richard gave his life for you too, don’t forget that.” She hadn’t, and the reminder brought a solid ball of nausea to the back of her throat. “You think he would have wanted you to be like this? He did what he did because he wanted you to live, not just survive.”

He was supposed to make her feel better, give her confidence in her decision. Instead, he edged open the window of doubt and she shivered at the draft that blew in.

It was too late to repair the damage done and she feared that she had torn a clean hole in the trust that she and Carlos had built slowly over the last four months. She couldn’t tell him the truth, couldn’t use that to fill the chasm she had blown in their friendship with a lie he had seen right through. If she did, he would persuade her, talk her out of it – there would be no trying, it would just happen, with that way he had.

For the first time in her life, Jill Valentine felt utterly clueless. There was no clear next move, no right way to proceed. Each option had downsides as catastrophic as the last.

She came close to asking Chris for his impartial opinion. There was no certainty that he would be capable of giving one, but he had always brought sense to the moments where she felt she had none. But asking would be admitting that maybe she had been wrong, and she wasn’t quite ready to do that just yet.

“We promised each other we’d be open and honest,” she said sorrowfully. “It’s how we got through the worst of it after RC – pooled our strength and took what we needed, rather than demanded too much of one another, like you and I did. I asked him to come to Europe, I promised him so many things, as a lover and a friend, and I’ve broken every single one of them. I don’t know if he will ever trust me again, not the way he used to.”

“Then be honest. If he really does care about you, he’ll understand.”

“He’ll talk me out of it. Even without trying.”

Chris laughed at this.

“That’s impossible. You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met.”

“You don’t know him,” she said, trying to laugh but coming up short. “He tells me it’s all going to be okay, and I believe him. It always feels like it will be with him.”

Chris grimaced.

“He’s a tough guy,” he offered. “I’ve seen how much he can bench. You might want to believe him on that one.”

“Whose side are you on?” she growled.

“Yours. Always. But you know I’m always going to call you out. _Supercop_.”

“Please don’t ever call me that.”

“I dunno, it’s catching.”

“It’s personal.”

A heavy silence lingered, like a raincloud about to burst.

“You always hated nicknames.”

Jill considered this. He wasn’t wrong.

When she didn’t reply: “Where did it come from, anyway?”

She thought back, to that infuriating smirk on the train.

“It’s just his way,” she said, realising too late that she was smiling. “I mean…it was meant to wind me up. And it did. Until it didn’t…”

She looked at Chris and he was looking back at her with a boyish smile that suggested she had missed a punchline somewhere in her own words.

“You might want to think into why that is,” he said.

The meaning of his words was lost on her, but he didn’t press it.

“C’mon,” he said. “You’ll feel better after food.”

* * *

_Carlos didn’t mind the pain – he was used to that. Always was a clumsy idiot, always getting into fights. Maybe he had a concussion – it sure as hell felt like it. But he could deal with that. Some bed rest, a few painkillers – no problem._

_He didn’t mind the taunts, the jibes, the idiot asking what the hell a Rolo-sounding kid like him was doing in this neck of the woods, playing with guns._

_He didn’t even mind the threats._

_“How about you tell us where you’re hiding out, fucker? You got ten toes and ten fingers – that gives you about twenty minutes until we go for something bigger.”_

_“Eight fingers, two thumbs, asshole,” he’d laughed, every shake of his shoulders reminding him just how battered his body was.._

_The short one hit him so hard after that he’d lost consciousness for a second time, and when he came to, the chair on his left was empty and a scream tore through the cabin he’d found himself tied up in._

_That, he minded. He minded it very much._

_“You let him go,” he’d spat, wrestling with his restraints again._

_They just laughed at him. The short one, and the ugly one._

_“You wanna help him?” the ugly one asked. “You tell us where the rest of you cockroaches are hiding out. Else he’s gonna have a very bad time and you…you’re gonna end up just like your friend here._

_The short one grabbed his head, forced him to look at the corpse strung to the rickety wooden chair to his right. He looked like he could have been sleeping, if not for the fact that Carlos could see a bit of his brains through what had once been a solid skull._

_“He didn’t talk. You’ve been here hours, nobody is coming for you. Your friends have abandoned you. What loyalty do you owe them?”_

_They tried to hurt him. Gave him a couple scars he’d carry for a few years, too. The fingernails they took would grow back, the wounds they inflicted would heal. No way in hell he was giving the others up, and he wasn’t about to die here._

_Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and it held back the pain as the ugly one got a little too close and Carlos slammed his forehead into the man’s skull. The short one ran forward, away from his gun, close enough that Carlos was able to work a leg under his, bring him to the ground, press his foot against his throat and hold it there until he passed out. Maybe. He wasn’t moving, and that’s all he cared about. The chair was old, wobbly, and when he dropped his weight onto it a few times enough of it broke that he could wriggle free from his binds._

_It was the ugly one’s AK that took down his friends in the next room. Two of them, laughing and goading one another, blood streaked across their bruised knuckles. Savages, the fucking lot of them._

_As Carlos approached Oscar, strung by a thin rope from a ceiling beam, he thought for sure his friend was dead. Blood poured from a wound in his head, and his torso was marred with shallow lacerations._

_“Fucking hell,” he muttered, reaching for a bloodied knife on the floor to cut through the binds. One of his shoulders was dislocated, and Carlos hoped to hell he knew how to fix it himself ‘cause he sure as hell didn’t. “Oscar? Can you hear me, amigo? C’mon man, not like this.”_

_Oscar gasped for breath, swiping his fist in a weak punch that barely parted the air before him. He was awake, and far more alert than Carlos assumed he would be given the situation._

_“Carlos?” Oscar slurred. “Shit, you’re alive! They fucked me up, man.”_

_“Yeah, and I fucked them up right back. C’mon, we gotta go.”_

_“David, we gotta-“_

_“David’s dead.”_

_“Cristian?”_

_“I don’t know.”_

_“You saved my life.”_

_“Not yet I haven’t, c’mon.”_

_“Just…gimme a second.”_

_Oscar managed to sit upright on his own and clutched his shoulder. They could spare a second, sure._

_“Go find Cristian,” he said. “I gotta take care of this. Fuck, I hate this part…”_

_Carlos handed the AK to his friend and cast him one final look as he backed out into the main room, making a beeline for the other rifle he’d seen propped against the doorway. It was loaded, but there wasn’t much left. He wondered what they’d done with their guns. Probably taken them somewhere to sell them on or buff out their own armoury. Glorified vigilantes, wanting to take the law into their own hands but causing more damage than they ever sought to avenge. It was like setting your whole house on fire to kill a spider._

_He walked over to the unconscious men on the floor, looking up sharply as Oscar cried out against a thud that shook the adjoining wall. Carlos pressed two fingers against the ugly one’s carotid artery and felt a weak but steady pulse. The short one was alive too and had started to gently snore as Carlos patted him down, feeling for spare ammunition._

_Though his search came up empty, something caught his eye beneath the guy’s open shirt; a thin leather cord leading to a small wooden charm. A chill found its way into the cabin now, and his fingers shook as he reached for the pendant, tugging it hard enough to break the thing where it was tied at the back of the guy’s neck._

_It was a bear, expertly carved into unfinished wood, square in shape and almost abstract in design. It was a design he knew well, and all at once his knees grew weak and he was gripped with a fear that cut down to his core._

Carlos blinked awake, the low drone of the radio pricking at the edge of his senses, refusing to allow him to fall back into his slumber.

“Welcome back,” Barry said. He looked out through a pair of binoculars, over the edge of the hill they sat on and down into the valley.

Of course.

“Shit,” Carlos said. “Sorry.”

“You obviously needed it. Claire did mention you haven’t been sleeping.”

He grimaced at this as he pushed himself up in the passenger-side seat of Barry’s truck, rolling his shoulder to work out an ache in his left arm.

“And how do you think she knows that?”

Barry lowered the binoculars.

“Don’t take it personally,” he said. “Nobody’s sleeping well these days, not even me. Looked like you were having some bad dreams there, too.”

“Not dreams,” Carlos corrected. “Memories.”

It was closing in on the anniversary of his disillusionment, of the first slab placed on the path that had led him to Raccoon City. A path paved with the best intentions, as such paths often were. The nightmares had started to take on a sinister edge, taking memories he had thought were protected, shielded, and twisted them into something rotten. He’d dreamt about that cabin before, about Oscar strung up like a hunk of meat. Once, David had worked his way through their captors, gnawing flesh from bone until his hungry eyes turned to his former comrade. Another time, it had been Oscar who had pinned him down and chewed through the cartilage of his ear, breath hot against his cheek.

This was the first time the memory had played out straight. No monsters. Only men, and their sins.

“Sorry I zoned out on you,” he said. “That was shitty of me.”

Barry shrugged.

“It’s not like you missed anything.”

The facility sprawled across the valley below them – four single-story buildings hiding what they all knew must be a labyrinth of laboratories beneath the surface. Umbrella did like their underground labs. It was so deliciously supervillain of them. With any luck, they would be running through the hallways of those laboratories within the week; they hadn’t even seen a single guard all afternoon, and that was never a good sign.

Carlos was grateful for the distraction, however fruitless their assignment had transpired to be. He couldn’t just hang around the house anymore, not with her there.

He’d played with that wound, held the edges open and peered into it, hoping to find some sort of clue as to how he had sustained it. And somehow the nightmares were worse without her, clouding his mind until everything was red and raw, and he just wanted to spend his days with his head under the duvet and forget.

She carried on like nothing had changed, but in the glances he stole he saw that she felt as raw as he did, saw her distracted as she worked. This wasn’t what she had asked for and it confused the hell out of him. It was over, perhaps as it was always meant to be, but it wasn’t the sudden loneliness that stung, wasn’t the lack of her affection in his life.

It was the lies.

Maybe the truth was something they still couldn’t work through, but at least he’d have closure and could hold his head up high as he moved on. After all, it was his own fault for falling in love with her; he knew the deal all along, she didn’t owe him anything.

Even without the tangle he’d got his emotions in, he cared about Jill, more than he’d ever cared about anyone. His life was better just for having her in it, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have been where he was now, fighting the actual good fight, without her. He wanted to make amends, wanted their partnership back, but he needed a little give from her for that to happen. Quite frankly, he didn’t see her stubbornness allowing that and every day that passed only seemed to make it harder on both of them.

Leon had offered him an out, offered him the opportunity to work for the government, to eke an honest living in the States. As much as he had scoffed at that in the beginning, the more he heard about this Benford guy the more respect he had for him and the more it didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. At the very least, he could move back to New York, testify and then maybe get a shitty minimum wage job and lay low until he figured out what his next move would be. Jill had made it abundantly clear that the war they were fighting in Europe was _her_ war, and he no longer felt part of that. He had to make his own way, define his own future. Maybe in the end Chris was right, and he really didn’t belong here. Maybe joining her in the first place, believing something better awaited, was the mistake.

“I can tell you’re thinking about her,” Barry said with a sad, knowing smile. “I know she’s real worked up right now. She gets that way – focused, blinkers on. But I’ve seen the way she looks at you and that ain’t no passing admiration.”

Carlos grunted.

“Give her time, and she’ll snap back.”

“She’s gotta do what’s right for her. I’m not gonna be the one that gets in the way of that. I can’t be.”

He could feel Barry looking at him.

“I think we just need space,” he said. “More than a couple walls can give us. I know _I_ do. Gotta figure my own head out before I do anything else.”

Barry hadn’t moved, observed him in a manner that made him feel wholly uncomfortable, like he could see exactly what was spinning around in his mind.

“This ain’t because of Chris, is it?”

Kind of, but he didn’t know how to word that either.

“What, you don’t think this is a good look for me?”

Barry’s eyes glided over the bruises on his face.

“He’s a hothead, always has been. Guy your size, you could have knocked him clean out if you’d tried.”

“Not my style.” A pause, for consideration. “Tempting, though.”

Laughter filled the car.

“Don’t up and leave without telling her,” Barry requested, suddenly sounding very fatherly. “Whatever you think, she does care about you. In fact, I’d rather the two of you talk it out and you stay. You’re part of the family now, we’ll all miss you.”

A twinge of regret filled him. It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him recently. For one who felt so utterly lost in his own pain, having chased a will-o’-the-wisp for so long, it offered an honest hand through the fog, a step out of the mire of his mind.

“I can’t stay,” he said. “Claire needs her room back and…me being here is gonna cause problems with Chris, and you all-“

“Now I’mma stop you right there. You say ‘you all’ like it’s not ‘we’ now. You saved our girl, you brought her back to us, you made her smile like I’d not seen in months – I didn’t call you family to be cute, boy. Umbrella stung you too, the same way they stung all of us. It’s on Chris to deal with his shit, not you. You belong here, with us.”

Another brick punched out of the wall he had been building these last few days, the one he was cowering behind. An unpleasant sensation built behind his nose.

“You won’t get a better support network that the one you’ve got here,” Barry added.

And he was right. Jill aside, his midnight meetings with Claire in the kitchen had become an unintentional habit. She’d tell him about her dreams – an endless run down a hallway flanked with glistening suits of armour, and a voice she could never answer – and he would dance around his own, never truly admitting the extent of the horrors. But she hid too, never mentioned whose voice it was or what it was that was chasing her, so they accepted that silent compromise and took what comfort they could from voicing their frustrations. Even Rebecca had poked and prodded a time or two, shared her own guilt over the fear her inexperience put her teammates in a bad position. He’d once asked her if she trusted him and she had responded “without a doubt”, claiming that judging someone on their past actions and surface appearances often missed the core of who they really were. She said this in such a way that he felt she wasn’t referring to him specifically, but rather someone hidden in her past.

Carlos didn’t know how to respond, so he reached over for the binoculars and returned to the task at hand, scouring the valley for signs of life.

It came as a monumental surprise when that was exactly what he found.

* * *

Jerome lay recovering in hospital, malnourished and dehydrated but most certainly not dying. It was fortunate that one of the group’s backers was on the hospital’s executive board so they could get him a nice, quarantined room without too many questions being asked.

They’d not been able to fully question him yet, but the PDA and accompanying floppy disc they had found on his person had provided enough information to rally them all to arms.

They were shipping out tonight – that decision had been made. Get in there quick, before Umbrella Security Services showed up, take what they could and leave nothing there for the company to salvage.

Chris was anxious to get moving, as were they all. It wasn’t the S.T.A.R.S. way to sit around and deliberate, and it certainly wasn’t theirs.

He was almost the last to leave the rec centre that had become their HQ, leaving Rebecca to pack up her files as he wandered in the direction of the car, hoping to squeeze in a smoke before they returned home.

“-for sorting this, Carla, I appreciate it.”

He stopped in his tracks as he heard Carlos’s voice drift out of one of the smaller rooms flanking the main hallway.

“Thank _you_ , Carlos,” replied Carla Ramirez the stout security agent turned schoolteacher that had become the de facto leader of their group. “We will sort out plane tickets next week, after we’ve sifted through the current mess.”

Chris leaned against the wall around the corner from the door, close enough to hear but far enough away that he couldn’t be accused of eavesdropping.

Was he leaving?

“Are you sure this is what you want?” Carla asked. “You seemed so happy here.”

“Things change. I just…need some time to figure things out. A change of scenery.”

Chris rooted around in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and frowned at the almost-empty packet. He didn’t have time to get more before the mission.

“Make sure you build a support network. You’ve been through a lot and I can see how much you’re struggling with it. Don’t take that all on alone.”

“They trained you to read people, huh?”

“I’m a mother. That was all the training I need. The trauma we all carry is not trivial. If you don’t address it, it will eat you up.”

“This is a very long-winded way of saying ‘take care of yourself’.”

The conversation droned on as Chris closed his eyes and leaned back into the hard cement wall. His mind drifted back to his earlier conversation with Jill. She was in love with that asshole, whether she knew that yet or not. She was never one to cut off her nose to spite her face, and her professional and practical decisions were always flawless but he didn’t think he’d ever met anyone that made such a mess out of their personal life under the belief that they were doing what was necessary. He’d tried to intervene in the past, and it had never ended well, and he felt less willing to now, when he wanted the guy out of the picture and didn’t particularly care how.

Despite that, muscles contracted within his chest and he felt sick to his stomach. He looked down at the unlit cigarette in his hand, his appetite for the thing suddenly gone.

Movement snapped him out of his reverie, and he looked up in time to see Carlos round the corner and pause when he saw him standing there. He considered him for a moment, seemed ready to speak, then shook his head as if to say ‘forget about it’ and continued on his way.

“You’re leaving?” Chris asked, the words pulled from his throat by something he didn’t quite understand.

Carlos stopped again, turned to face him.

“Figures you were spying on me,” he said. “First you get Leon to dive into my records, now I can’t even have a private conversation without you butting in. Yeah, he told me, by the way. Hell of a power move, Chris.”

Chris’s flesh felt cold and stiff. Was this guilt? He made a mental note to berate Leon, then crumpled it – he’d not asked him to keep it to himself, just to keep it from Jill and Claire. If Carlos knew, it made sense that they did too. The wall he leaned against was sturdy, but something crumbled around him all the same.

“I was just making sure you were who you said you were,” he defended.

“You were looking to validate your own paranoia. I’m assuming from this-” he gestured to his still-bruised face “-that you didn’t?”

His blood did not boil the way it should have. There was no urge to instigate aggression, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Carlos probably would have punched him back this time. But when Chris looked at him now he didn’t see the imposing figure that had blocked his way in the gym. He saw a man with too few hours’ sleep under his belt, one who found no joy in anything in the world around him. He was looking at himself.

“Does Jill know you’re leaving?”

“I don’t see how that has anything to do with you.”

That was a no, then.

Chris shrugged.

“No skin off my nose.”

Carlos shook his head again and walked away with long steps, wanting to put as much distance between the two of them as possible.

Chris wasn’t a patient man, but he’d been content to wait for the inevitable. Eventually Jill would see through Carlos’s scheme, would give him the boot. Or the man himself would expose his true nature, and they’d all bring an end to it. It was something he would have catalysed himself had Jill not stood in the blast zone. Finally, he had what he wanted. He could relax, knowing his friends, his _family_ were safe again, that everything was back to normal, back to how it should be.

He felt sick. This wasn’t how it was supposed to feel. He looked at the cigarette, closed his fist around it and felt it crumple against his palm.

“Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've almost caught up with myself in terms of chapters written vs posted, so there may be a little delay on next chapter (I'm hoping not, but just in case!). Next chapter is shaping up to be a bit longer to make up for it, however, and far more action-packed as we move on to the next arc :).
> 
> Thanks as always for your support, I love you all <3.


	7. Valerian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uncharacteristic though it was, she had slipped into a passive state as of late. She’d just let things happen as they happened, let the current take her and if a jutting rock clipped her then it clipped her. Her plans were not quite as well thought out as they used to be, emotional and chaotic, and it had got to the point where the river was flowing too fast for her to grab for purchase and pull herself out.
> 
> ~~
> 
> Into the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are! Our guys finally doing what they do best. I promised more action, but I ended up rearranging what events go in what chapter so this one is a bit more mellow than expected to keep a reasonable length. I am hoping to get a lot more written over the upcoming long weekend (hey, what’s a social life in 2020?) because I really want to start posting more frequently, especially throughout the facility chapters where there's stuff I'm really keen to get down and out :).
> 
> Thanks as always for your support - you really do keep me going and I appreciate you all! <3

** Personal Diary of Dr. Emmett Macintosh, PhD. **

**_Jan 2 nd 1999._ **

_I told them they were wasting their time, but did they listen? Of course not. Millions down the drain, on a fucking plant of all things. On the plus side, looks like this will be the end of the botanical ventures. Dr Stone mentioned something about expanding the fungus program – I guess they’re determined to find something new to mess around with. Honestly, at this point it feels like flinging shit at the wall to see what sticks._

**_Jan 4 th 1999._ **

_Plant 44 is scheduled for termination tomorrow. Good riddance._

**_Jan 5 th 1999._ **

_Dr Stone needs to keep a fucking leash on his team. Gordon, the intern guy, the one that knows shit all about cross-contamination? Guess what he did? Yeah, sector 4 is now in complete lockdown while they scrape that fungal shit off the walls. So no go on the disposal of 44 until we can get through. Heard F-07 is dead in the water too. We should probably just burn the whole sector and be done with both of them. Opportunity of a lifetime, my arse. I should have never left the UK._

**_Jan 7 th 1999_ **

_Well, I’ll be damned. F-07? It got into Plant 44. I don’t even know how, but the changes we have observed are nothing short of ground-breaking. The disposal has been postponed indefinitely and I’m not sure I disagree with that. We’ve been seeing some interesting things happen. Aggression, though nothing to concern ourselves with yet. The thing still doesn’t like fire so a quick blast when it gets too touchy-feely seems to be working._

**_Jan 8 th 1999._ **

_There’s seven in sick bay today. We clocked in this morning and the entire night crew were passed out in the greenhouse. We went in with full hazmat gear to pull them out, just to be safe. Vital signs are stable – they’re alive but nothing we do seems capable of waking them. What the fuck?_

**_Jan 11 th 1999._ **

_Five dead, two showing elevated vitals with intermittent seizures, and we’re all placing bets on how long now, not if. I don’t understand. No wounds, they’ve tested negative for T, and the Beckett insists we have nothing else on site. It’s like they just went to sleep and didn’t wake up._

**_Jan 16 th 1999._ **

_Seven dead now, and six more in sick bay today, all from dorm 17. No signs of a struggle, they were all tucked up in their pyjamas. The autopsies came back from the first five and the closest they can come to a cause of death is SUDEP (despite none of the victims suffering from epilepsy or having any history of seizures prior to whatever the fuck happened to them). I heard the nurses chatting, you know how they like to gossip. Said they were screaming in their sleep, sweating, twitching – hell of a way to go. They’re rushing samples through toxicology now, we should know more in the morning._

* * *

Jill was lost again, absorbing the words of a mad scientist like a rock absorbed the rain.

Tossing the file aside, she tapped her foot on the dirt floor and looked around the small, empty tent. The others were already gone, long since changed into their tactical gear and fiddling with the straps of their respirators. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, reminded herself why they were here and what their goal was.

Instead, she saw _him_. Those eyes, dark and kind; the lashes that framed them thick and longer than her own. The way he smiled, closed-mouthed and lopsided, like the act itself was an embarrassment, like men like him shouldn’t laugh but he wanted to anyway. How he would crack a joke at the best and the worst moments and made someone smile every time.

_“He’s leaving, you know.”_

_“I know a lot of ‘he’s, Chris.”_

_“Carlos.”_

_“Pretty poor taste for a joke, don’t you think?”_

_“I’m not joking. Heard him talking to Carla.”_

_“Why are you telling me this?”_

_“’Cause I’ve got the feeling this isn’t what you wanted.”_

Chris was right, as always. This was not what she had intended. She didn’t want to see him garroted by a snare she had placed, but she didn’t want him to abandon the trek either. She only intended to lose a lover, not a friend.

Uncharacteristic though it was, she had slipped into a passive state as of late. She’d just let things happen as they happened, let the current take her and if a jutting rock clipped her then it clipped her. Her plans were not quite as well thought out as they used to be, emotional and chaotic, and it had got to the point where the river was flowing too fast for her to grab for purchase and pull herself out.

Distracted. That was the excuse she had used. Distracted and unfocused, needing to concentrate on the bigger picture and not have her mind and judgement clouded by personal feelings.

Was it karma? In wielding that lie as a weapon had she shot herself in the foot? Had the lie wormed its way into her psyche and mutated until it became truth? They were perhaps half an hour away from packing themselves into the back of a van and diving headlong into danger and there she was holding together an open wound in her chest.

Fuzzy-headed, she pinched the bridge of her nose. Her plan, half-formed though it was, was to ignore the thing she needed to do, the shadow looming over her, and address it after the mission, when emotions could come into play without threatening to set anyone off-centre. But here she was, stumbling before they’d even set foot in the damn place. She couldn’t go in like this; she was a liability.

“Fuck,” she hissed, and pushed herself to her feet. This couldn’t wait.

So, she took a deep, shaking breath and made her move.

The munitions tent was almost empty, the others having vacated that area too. The guns were already packed, and her own pouches were filled with spare ammunition. All that remained in storage was the explosives, and that is exactly what she found Carlos sorting through.

“Hey,” he greeted, turning away from his task for only the briefest of moments.

Her stomach flipped when she saw him, sending something spinning into her chest, knocking her heart out of place and winding her completely. Black was his colour, had been as long as she’d known him. It highlighted the tan of his skin, clung to the contours of his muscles in a way that was almost fluid, and that’s exactly what it did now that he was clad head to toe in it. His hair, longer now than it had been in Raccoon City, was kept out of his eyes with a navy blue bandana, and it took everything in her to not reach out and run her hands through the soft waves, longing for that familiar comfort.

“This is a good look for you,” she said, unsure how he would respond. But he smiled, genuinely, and sidled a little to allow her room at the table too.

“Carla said I look like I belong in a boy band.”

Jill snorted.

“She’s not wrong.”

“Got a spare one and an opening for a backup dancer if you’re game?”

“Have you seen my dancing?”

“Have you heard my singing?”

It took a moment for them both to realise that they were laughing, comfortable in one another’s presence in a way that hadn’t felt possible lately. And for barely a heartbeat, he had looked at her the way he used to, and she felt that pull, that longing for things that once were.

Fear followed it, and it wasn’t the type she had grown accustomed to. She reached for one of the bundles neatly laid out before them and began to absently inspect the wires. Another inch on the band-aid – a mantra she was hoping she wouldn’t come to live by.

“I heard you’re leaving,” she said.

He paused what he was doing, then let out a hiss of a sigh.

“Figures he told you.”

So, Chris had been telling the truth. God, she’d hoped he was lying, or at the very least had misunderstood what he had heard. He always had been quick at jumping to conclusions. But there was no denial in Carlos’s response, just frustration.

“I was going to tell you,” he added. “Soon as I knew when.”

Not if, _when_.

The flip of her stomach had progressed from acrobatics to dizzying manoeuvres and she felt nauseous. This had never been the plan.

“You don’t have to leave,” she said quickly. “I don’t want you to leave.”

He picked up one of the charges, placed it into a holdall at the edge of the table and then stacked two more beside it. A pause followed, his lips parted, then he shook his head, his expression settling into one she had come to know far too well.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” she continued, feeling the sudden need to explain herself, her chest seizing painfully at the thought of losing him, _truly_ losing him. “That was never my intention. I want us to still be friends.”

“That’s exactly why I’m leaving.” He turned to look at her and she felt utterly small in his gaze. “Because I still want to be your friend, Jill, but if I don’t leave now, if I don’t get some space, that’s not gonna happen.”

His words hit her square in the chest, stopped the whirlwind inside of her, left her with nothing but a hollow, whistling emptiness. If she’d ever been unsure just how much she had hurt him, it was there, not in the words, but in the weight of his voice.

“I’m sorry.”

It was all she felt able to offer, still coming up short when it came to the truth. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it certainly wasn’t the ghost of pain that flickered across his face, a reminder that whatever he once felt for her was still there, still burning away. Perhaps he was right, perhaps he did need time and space. He would leave, he would forget what he felt and that would be it – they would be friends, the hope of anything else fading like distant memories often did.

“It’s not just us,” he said. It sounded more like a promise than clarification. “I…got a lot of things rattling around in here.” He tapped his head. “Rubble, Captain Viktor used to call it. Whole avalanche of it. I need some time to figure that out.”

“You don’t need space for that. Talk to me, we can figure it out together, the way-“

He laughed, and the words fell away.

“You want me to trust you? When you can’t be honest with me? Jill, I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out what the fuck I did to push you away, how I messed up so bad you can’t even put it into words. And you know what? I don’t think I did. What I’ve got keeping me awake, that’s my own personal shit. If you can’t be honest with me about something that affects us both, how the hell am I supposed to trust you enough to let you in like that?”

There it was. Clear as day. The damage, catalogued, categorised and in plain English. Somehow she had managed not only to cut through their friendship, but also everything they had built up over months of solidarity. The support network they had created was no more, and she wasn’t the only one reeling from its loss.

_‘Well, Jill. Is this what you wanted?’_

“Please don’t go,” she found herself asking, adamant that it was not a plea. Jill Valentine didn’t plead, it wasn’t in her nature.

“You want me to stay? All you gotta do is give me a reason to. Just one.”

It was there, on the tip of her tongue. But now was neither the time nor place.

“Give me half an hour,” she asked. “Before you go, give me time and we’ll talk through this, just…give me that chance. I know I don’t deserve it, but…I’ll be as honest as I know how. And if you still want to leave…I’ll learn to be okay with that.”

Truth was, she didn’t know how to explain the cataclysm that was the revelation she reeled from, not to mention how that impacted him. But now she had time to think about it and if she couldn’t figure it out then she’d just say what felt right. Honesty scared her, but so did the thought of never seeing him again, and that was always a possibility if he left.

Carlos looked at her and softened.

“Okay,” he said.

And that was that. He collected the last couple charges and, rather than depositing them in the bag that was within reach, handed them to her.

It was something.

* * *

Rebecca had sworn that she wouldn’t dive into another suicidal mission. The July nightmares were only just calming, replaced with dreams filled with curiosity, ideas, and a man locked firmly away in the darkness of that past. She tried to remember how strong she had felt back then, holding her own alongside a man who truly didn’t need her help, but the memories paled beneath the shadow of what had followed. The exhaustion, the weakness, the fear. Seeing Chris and being caught between relief that rescue was _finally t_ here, and dread at the realisation that now they were all caught up in that mess. Perhaps if it had all ended with Billy Coen, she would have been okay. Before she watched the rest of her team die, before she discovered that someone she had trusted had been the cause of it all.

She had promised herself that she was done with law enforcement and that little experiment was a categorical failure, yet here she was, clad in black tactical gear, half of which she didn’t even know the name for, armed to the teeth and heading into a hot zone.

‘You’re here for the data, that’s all,’ she told herself.

Bravo team again. Infiltrators, data collectors. Fucking _Bravo team_.

She hadn’t even bothered removing her gun from its holster. They’d not met any resistance thus far, but they’d hardly found anything of use either. Administrative offices, computers filled with personnel data that looked to be useless now that everyone was most likely dead.

The facility was not well hidden, it didn’t need to be. Nobody got on-site without the right clearance so there was no need for a secure entrance. It was in the middle of the Spanish countryside, not a city, and from what the intel suggested it wasn’t involved in high-level production of anything that could threaten the villages nearby. Why waste all that money on a state of the art security system?

It made their work easy.

Bravo team – herself, Leon, Barry, Denise and Dimitri – explored long, congruent hallways of white tiles and polished chrome. Leon checked his PDA every few minutes, directed them, and checked in with Alpha and Charlie as they descended to the second level.

They marched out of the stairwell with guns drawn this time but were met with an equally welcoming silence. Sleek white hallways made way this time to active labs, with their equipment clean and sorted away, their piles of paperwork neatly stacked, and PPE still resting on hooks by the door.

This place wasn’t abandoned in a hurry – it bore the marks of a workplace simply packed down for the day.

A single row of desks flanked by two of flat tables took up the centre of their next room. Along the back wall, white plastic cabinets rose to waist height and above them rows upon rows of Perspex specimen trays climbed ladder-like up the wall, backlit by a harsh yellow light.

Rebecca edged closer, leaned forward until she could confirm exactly what rested within – small grey, brown and blue shapes slightly shrivelled but abundant in numbers. The containment was hardly sterile, but that wasn’t needed here. They were mushrooms. Dried mushrooms of all colours and sizes, some cut into thin slices that curled at the edges, others shrunken and wrinkled, a few whole and smooth, clean roots dangling from rounded stumps.

“This ain’t the cafeteria,” Barry commented as Rebecca poked at one sample with a pen she had retrieved from a nearby desk.

“You don’t want to be eating these,” she assured him. She could have pulled the tray containing the bluish fungi out further, but she didn’t see what more it could tell her.

“Poisonous?”

She smiled.

“You see the colouring? That’s caused by oxidised psilocybin.”

“Am I supposed to know what that means?”

Dimitri laughed as he passed them and leaned in close.

“They’re the kind of mushrooms you eat for fun,” he explained.

Barry looked to Rebecca for confirmation and all she could do was smile, wide-eyed.

“The hell are Umbrella doing with magic mushrooms?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“There has been research into their medicinal uses. As corrupt as Umbrella are, they still produce legitimate medicines.”

The clear plastic of the trays allowed a view of their contents all the way to the top, a couple feet above her head. Each tray was labelled meticulously with curved black script on a white sticker.

_P. aeruginosus, P. americanus P. azurescens, P. hispanica_. Some of the species she recognised, others she did not.

“They all magic?” Leon asked.

“The ones I know, yeah. There may be some form of illegality here, but it’s hardly what we’re looking for.”

There was the click of a camera behind them, then a sharp whir as Denise seemed to decide that it was worth capturing anyway.

Rebecca didn’t have a wealth of knowledge in this area, but curiosity and the ever-hungry scholar in her brought her to peer into the other specimen trays, noticing that the samples differed in containment as well as shape and size as the wall stretched on.

It wasn’t just mushrooms. There were samples of mold sealed in petri dishes; colourful patterns that could have been works of art. There was even a jar of dried cordyceps militaris just sitting on the side.

“Dr Macintosh’s diary mentioned research into fungus,” she commented. “They’ve already explored viral and parasitic weaponry, this really isn’t a surprise.”

Leon picked up the jar of cordyceps and turned it over, the solid specimens inside rattling around as he did so.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

Rebecca smiled.

“It means make sure you keep your mask on.”

* * *

The sharp tap of smooth tile against the rubber soles of five pairs of boots was jarring on the senses. Carlos had been here before, staring down the sights of a customised M4, putting one foot in front of the other, chasing some unknown enemy. Only last time it had been the hard stone of city sidewalks and the crunch of broken glass underfoot and they really _hadn’t_ known the horrors of what lay ahead.

He hoped that no surprises awaited them here, that they knew exactly what Umbrella could throw at them, but he also knew better than to assume he knew what they were capable of..

Chris took point, guiding them from room to room, lab to lab, all the way down to the third level without so much as a hint of trouble. By the time they emerged from the stairwell into yet another sterile white corridor, he was starting to grow irritated.

“Muy tranquilo,” Miguel muttered from the back of their formation.

“Sospechoso,” Carlos agreed. “No me gusta.”

“Would help if we can talk in English,” Chris snapped.

“You know his English isn’t great,” Carlos said. “I can translate. But I got a feeling you were talking to me there, in which case _vete a la mierda, carechimba_.”

He saw Chris’s shoulders tense, but he said nothing. Whatever else he was, he was focused and professional when he needed to be. Maybe there was something in the tales Jill had told him after all.

“Miguel said it was quiet,” Claire explained to her brother. “Carlos agreed, said it was suspicious and he didn’t like it. I gotta say, I’m with him on that one.”

Her eyebrows raised behind her mask and Carlos assumed that she had flashed a smile at him. He would have returned it, but the seal of his mask felt uncomfortable against the rough of his beard every time he moved his jaw, so he settled for a gentle nod of the head.

The greenhouse was up ahead, spanning across all three levels and taking up most of what the map referred to as Sector 4. According to the data, Plant 44 grew at the very bottom, a centrepiece if you will. Their plan was simple – plant charges, get the hell out of there and blow that thing to pieces. They didn’t want to leave anything behind – if this wasn’t a breakthrough for them at least it would be a dead end for Umbrella too.

But Miguel was right, and they all felt it – it was too quiet. The closest they came to something, anything, was a splash of blood against otherwise pristine tiles, chunks of flesh spattered in one concentrated area, the left side of the stain streaked as though whoever this blood belonged to had decided to make their final moment an artistic one.

“Zombie,” Jill said plainly. Chris hummed in agreement, though Carlos failed to see exactly how they had deduced that from such a generic sample.

‘It’s not their first rodeo,’ he reminded himself. None of this was new to any of them, but the Redfield siblings and Jill had more outbreaks under their hats than any other members of their team.

Carlos wondered if this would ever become normal for him, if his ever-growing list of skills would one day include knowing almost psychically the ins and outs of creatures most would only ever read about in the tabloids. It was a chilling thought, that any of this could ever be considered ‘normal’.

“Sick bay is up ahead,” Jill called out. She clicked on her PDA, squinting at the map on the tiny screen. “Might be worth a look, what with the good doctor’s report.”

There was no verbal agreement, but Chris changed his position, veered to the left of the hallway ahead of a bend in the corridor on the right. Carlos carefully adjusted the bag at his waist, moving the weight of the charges and detonators within onto his hip.

“You smell that?” Claire asked.

They paused. Carlos inhaled through his nose, surprised to find that beyond the scent of fresh plastic he could now make out an unmistakable musty tone. He reached up to adjust the strap of his respirator and noticed the others do so too.

“This is not good,” said Miguel. “We should not smell anything. Filters should be enough.”

“Be careful,” urged Chris. “Anyone starts to feel light-headed, you shout up.”

There was definitely something in the air when they turned the corner, Carlos could _feel_ it. The light-headedness it brought wasn’t quite enough to make him speak up, but it made the walls pulse for a moment while his brain adjusted. It was almost like walking into a newly-decorated room, the stench of paint still thick in the air.

The corridor led to a single door at the end, with one set of double doors closer to them on the right. Jill held her back to the wall, reached out to press lightly on the door and it buckled easily beneath her touch. She nodded to Chris, an unspoken command passing between them.

For the force with which he entered the room, the doors barely made a sound, simply gave a soft _thwack_ as they hit something soft.

“Jesus.”

Chris’s gasp brought them all forward, filling the doorway so that nothing could have escaped.

The room was long and wide, housing twenty beds, rolled into a line of ten against each wall. A nurse’s station of sorts – two desks and two computers – occupied one corner, covered in an array of paperwork and disposables. And all along the far wall, from the seventh bed all the way around to the opposite corner of the perpendicular wall, thick layers of crumbling greenish-black mold grew over every exposed surface, thick and bulbous, distorting the shapes into something malignant and alien. Long darkened fingers crept along the ceiling and tiled floor, covered in thin fluffy white veins. The air around it swirled in a breathy haze, warping and distorting the surface of the blight, making it seem almost _alive_.

“Guess we found the source of that smell,” Jill commented. She stepped forward, crouching at the edge of one of the extended fingers and held a partially-gloved hand above it. “It’s cold. You can feel the temperature change.”

“Be careful,” Carlos urged. “Spores. Don’t want to breathe that shit in.”

She looked up at him, blue eyes wide behind her mask.

“I feel fine,” she shrugged. “Let’s…look around. See if you can find anything. Just try not to touch that stuff.”

* * *

The second level was a bust. Nothing but notes upon notes on fungal growth patterns and spore dispersion. Basic stuff, nothing that would prop up their side of a court case.

Rebecca was getting uncomfortable. This could be a trap. Maybe there was no biohazard. Maybe this was a legitimate research facility and there had just been a gas leak or something. Maybe they were so desperate and so paranoid they had begun to find conspiracy where there was none.

“Tell me you’ve found something,” Leon said. He was getting tired too – they must have been down here at least two hours and so far it had proven to be a nothing more than a big waste of time and resources.

“There has to be something here,” she said. “Dr. Macintoshs’ journal mentioned ‘T’ – they have to have something more specific. If there are samples of the T-Virus here, if we can find anything that ties its development to Umbrella then…” She sighed. “Maybe Charlie found something? Maybe we just got unlucky with our area.”

“Can’t get a hold of them. Signal in this place is shocking, Alpha keep dipping in and out too.”

He walked away before she could respond, pulled a file off a bookshelf on the wall and began to flick through it almost lazily.

This lab was the fourth they had found on the third floor, but so far seemed the most promising if not purely for the wealth of documents filed away on shelving that encircled the room. Rebecca clicked her way through yet another unlocked computer, finding more unpublished journals and research notes she could barely make head nor tail of.

There was something about a chemical compound the researchers were trying to construct by splicing the genetics of different fungi. So far their crowning achievements included an extra tasty strain of portobello and a purple mushroom that induced a three-day long trip. These had all been written off as failures. F-01 through to F-06, they were labelled. There were further notes on ‘spore dispersal’ but no elaboration on what this meant or what they were trying to achieve.

A notification in the bottom right of the screen caught her eye, a tiny red circle. She clicked on it.

“Robert Thompson,” she read. “You need to lock down your emails, my friend.”

Alas, where Dr. Thompson lacked in data security, he excelled in inbox management and there were frighteningly few messages within. A couple ‘community bulletins’, a warning over the state of a common area, a note about a fortnightly book club, a few crude messages between friends.

But one caught her eye – an unread message from an E. Macintosh.

**_E. Macintosh has shared a workspace with you_**.

“Has he now?”

She clicked on the link within the email and another window opened – a personal log that looked awfully familiar. There were a few ramblings about a virologist being hired into a lab where no actual virology work was taking place, a complaint about a colleague hoarding some favoured snack, and then the entries they had been able to pull from the PDA Jerome had smuggled out.

But this one did not end at January 16th.

**_Jan 17 th 1999._ **

_Another 26 out today. Four missing, all from Sectors 3 and 4. No-one is allowed in or out without full hazmat gear. Even then, I’m too afraid to go anywhere near ground zero. Toxicology came back and while the results weren’t as conclusive as we were hoping, the victims all had traces of a sedative and an hallucinogenic compound in their system. But get this – they didn’t match the makeup of anything we have here, or anything we know. I bet my ass it’s the fungus team. They’re denying it of course but fuck knows what they’ve been cooking up in their labs. Bet they spliced too many magic mushrooms into their freaky fungus. I know what they do between shifts when they’re bored, and we all know what happened to the night shift the other week. Idiots. Whatever it is, the nurses have nicknamed it Krueger for obvious reasons._

**_Jan 20 th 1999._ **

_It wasn’t the fungus._

_It was the fucking plant. Botany screwed up and now we’re all up fucked. The plant was some kind of fucking dreamroot. They didn’t think it was of any consequence to the initial trials but when that fungus got in… The mutations induced by T must have amplified the oneirogenic effects, but we weren’t using the damn thing for tea leaves so we never knew. Then the fungus got in, and the spores…the spores have been carrying that shit all over the facility. I’ve locked myself in here, but I don’t know how long I can hold out. Nobody is coming. The spores shouldn’t reach me here, but my only way out is through the thick of it…I’ll starve to death if I don’t die in my sleep. I’ve shared this with you, Rob, because you still have a chance. Get out of here before it’s too late. Burn this place to the ground._

“Leon.”

Leon ditched his file and appeared over her shoulder, squinting at the screen. The others joined him, and Rebecca sat there silently as they read, chewing on a thumbnail, trying to piece this all together in her head.

“What do they mean, ‘oneirogenic’?” asked Denise.

Rebecca looked up to Dimitri but even he was silent on this one.

“Something that affects sleep,” she explained. “Oneirogenic plants have been used in tribal rituals for centuries. They affect your dreams, some even have sedative or anesthetising effects. When whatever fungus they were working on infected the plant, it must have started feeding on it, now anyone who breathes in the spores released by that fungus gets a heavy dose of the plant’s compound. It means everyone here probably did die in their sleep – they passed out, had a hell of a dream and just didn’t wake up. Maybe a stroke, maybe a seizure, maybe their body just shut down, I don’t know…”

Barry grunted.

“Well, that makes our job easier,” he said. “Just don’t breathe that shit in.”

“I wish it was that simple. If this is true then the fungus adapted with the plant, suggesting that F-07 is parasitic, and we have no idea how it’s going to change its host. Some parasites are known to influence behaviour and temperament which is usually not an issue with plants because they’re hardly sentient but look what T did to 42 and 43. Dr Macintosh mentioned increased aggression and that was weeks ago. We don’t know what it might have evolved into in that time. It could have grown to take over a larger area of the facility by now – it could be more dangerous.”

Leon looked back to the screen, scanned the last couple entries again, and swore.

~~

“Man, they _really_ don’t care about data security here,” Jill huffed when the computer at the nurse’s station unlocked without a password prompt.

“They think people will not come here,” Miguel pointed out. “Security at the gate and at the entrance – impossible to make it this far without getting caught.”

The others took his word for it. Not only did it make sense, but he had worked in a lab like this for the better part of two years – if anyone knew the inner workings of a place like this, it was him.

As Carlos turned a wary eye back to the mound of diseased blackness and the swirling fog that covered it, he caught Miguel shifting his weight onto his left leg in a move that was far from fluid. He held his shoulders low, his brow gently furrowed behind his mask, and Carlos could see every breath in the gentle heave of his shoulders.

“Estas bien?” he asked.

Miguel rolled his shoulders.

“Feel sick,” he said. “Very warm here. Estaré bien.”

“Maybe you should step outside,” he suggested. “Whatever it is in here, it ain’t warm.”

Miguel shook his head, a bead of sweat dripping down his brow and settling where the plastic of his mask met his nose. Stubborn bastard.

“Alpha, this is Bravo, please respond, over.”

Carlos raised his hand to his ear out of habit.

“Read you loud and clear, over,” said Chris, stepping away from where Jill continued to work at the desk.

“We found the rest of Macintosh’s diary,” Leon’s voice crackled through the line. “Turns out Plant 44 is some kind of dream…plant – after the fungus got into it, its spores have been carrying whatever its active ingredient is all over the facility. You inhale it, it knocks you out, you don’t wake up.”

Something else caught Carlos’s eye now, something where the dark sponge-like mold met the mattress of a gurney.

“You saying they all died in their sleep?”

“Checks out,” Jill said. “Look at this – patient logs. All follows the same pattern. Leon, nobody recovered from this. The logs just stop.”

Carlos edged closer to the gurney, tightened his grip on his rifle. Something was moving. The dry, fetid stench grew stronger the closer he moved to the black mass – was it pulsing now? His eyes ached, vision swam – he couldn’t be sure.

“Be careful,” Leon warned. “Rebecca thinks the fungus is acting like a parasite on the plant and it could have mutated in the time since exposure. You go in, set the charges, and you get back here, understood? Don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

Chris assured him that they wouldn’t, but Carlos barely registered his words. Something was _there_ , he could-

“Fuck!”

He jumped back a couple steps, the weight of the holdall almost throwing him off balance. Before he could shift its weight around enough to steady himself, Chris, Claire, and Miguel were at his side, weapons raised.

“What is it?” Chris barked.

He looked at the fingertips that now curled out of the mold, twitching erratically; they looked more like black pudding than flesh, mottled with the same thin white veins that covered the larger mass.

“I think I found the nursing staff,” he said.

There was a retching behind him, and Miguel fell to his knees, pulling his mask aside enough to vomit onto the tiled floor.

“Mask!” Claire shouted, on her knees beside him as he shoved it back into place and raised a hand, eyes bloodshot, the short curls of his hair plastered to his forehead.

“Ok, ok,” he panted. “See…did not breathe… _mierda_.”

He heaved and panted in movements that shook his entire body, but he was still awake, still functioning. He swallowed thickly and groaned.

“Uh, guys,” Jill called behind them. “You might want to see this.”

With a heavy jog, Carlos and Chris joined her again, crouching low enough to read the screen. Her PDA was connected to the hard drive by a single cable – she was downloading the patient records, just in case. But that was not what she pointed to.

“Someone was sending this information off-site,” she said. “It’s not just these patients, either. There were some cases just before all this started; staff hallucinating, panicking – one researcher stabbed his colleague to death with a pencil. They were treated and recovered but they were all on the team handling development of F-07.”

“I thought this thing put people to sleep?” Carlos pointed out.

“This was before the plant was even exposed. What the hell were they working on down here?”

Chris leaned closer over her right shoulder.

“You said they were sending this information off-site – any idea where?”

A couple clicks of the mouse and the email opened in another window.

Carlos felt her tense. The cursor drifted very slightly on the screen, edged closer to the address of the sender.

“A. Wesker,” Carlos read.

_Wesker_ …

Jill’s face had fallen, her eyes wide.

“ _The_ Wesker?”

“That’s…impossible,” Chris breathed. “He doesn’t work for Umbrella anymore.”

Maybe Carlos didn’t know the guy, but he knew Jill and he knew she didn’t frighten easily. Somehow, this time it was worse than before. And when she looked up at him, there was something else behind it, something urgent…desperate.

Then it was gone. A moment of weakness, but that was all she let it be.

“Think there’s any way of tracking this?” she asked.

“Through emails?” Chris said. “Don’t think so. At least we have an address – we can see if we can get someone to hack into it. Who knows what secrets could be locked away in there?”

His own fear seemed muted by excitement now, by a tenaciousness Carlos admittedly had not expected from him. Stubbornness, maybe, but there was that focus again.

“Wait a minute,” he said, noticing the fine print, so to speak. “ _Albert_ Wesker…Albert _is_ a male name, right? Your guy was definitely a _guy_?”

Chris shot him a quizzical look.

“The hell you talking about?”

“Y’know, wouldn’t kill you to learn another language. This email is written to a woman.”

“What’s it say?” asked Jill.

“Uh…just outlining symptoms, they’ve attached lab results to the email… ‘I heard of your recent research interests and thought the attached may be useful.”

She considered this for a second, and as he placed a hand on her shoulder, as comforting as felt appropriate given the circumstances, he felt her muscles relax. She seemed almost disappointed.

“Maybe he was married?” Carlos suggested. Chris laughed. “Sister? Coincidence?”

“Maybe whoever sent this didn’t know who they were talking to so defaulted to the feminine,” she theorised, downloading the emails to her PDA, “Either way, it’s a starting point.”

Carlos wanted to point out that wasn’t how Spanish worked but he could tell that she wasn’t truly convinced.


	8. The Greenhouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stirred so much devotion in her, even now that she had convinced herself that their relationship was over. You didn’t leave things unsaid when it came to the people you cared about, not when you took on the risks they did. But now was not the time to remind her of that, and here was not the place.
> 
> ~~
> 
> Watch your step.

The greenhouse was further into the facility than the maps gave it credit for and amounted to a whole half an hour’s trek from the sick bay, avoiding all other distractions. The bag of explosives weighed heavy on Carlos’s shoulder and did nothing to alleviate the moisture he could feel building beneath the cotton blend of his fatigues and the heavy plates of his armour.

Miguel was struggling, adjusting his collar at every opportunity. He was drenched in sweat and almost shaking. Poor bastard just wasn’t cut out for this. Even after Raccoon City and everything that came before it, Carlos was beginning to question if he was too.

Because the shadows twisted where wall met ceiling, and something lurked in the periphery, flitting away before it could be observed; they were alone but felt far from it.

“Feels claustrophobic,” said Claire. Even she was squirming, adjusting her hold on her gun every now and then, falling into Chris’s shadow as he glanced nervously back over his shoulder.

Eventually they reached a double doorway that would lead them, via way of another series of small rooms, to the three-storey greenhouse where Plant 44 was housed. None of them had quite known what to expect, especially with Leon’s warning still fresh in their minds, so they moved with caution and a slower pace than was probably necessary.

The doors led to a curved room, spacious and sparsely furnished. It put Carlos in mind of the executive rooms at the UBCS training camp, reserved only for the top brass and seeming to suit no purpose other than to allow a bunch of middle aged white men to sit around drinking expensive whiskey and smoking cigars. Along the curved edge of the room was a wall of greenery mottled with thin white veins and black flecks, almost entirely obscuring a light source beyond.

“This wall should back on to the greenhouse,” Jill said after another check of the map.

“Shall we just blow through it?” Carlos joked. “Save the trouble?”

She threw him a withering look and bumped him with her elbow, but he saw the pull of her cheeks beneath her mask. It wasn’t a vaccine for whatever ailed him, but it soothed him all the same.

“Uh, this isn’t a wall,” Claire said. She had moved closer to it, was now leaning forward cautiously, and reached out to press a fingertip to it. “This is a window.”

Carlos made to follow her, but Jill reached out to grab his arm, her eyes fixed on the greenery before them.

Claire was right – the ‘wall’ undulated, the slivers of light that glowed between vines dimming as the thick swathes of green moved so subtly perhaps nobody else would have noticed.

“They had a room like this in the NEST in Raccoon City,” Claire explained. “It was an ‘observation’ room, I guess where they showed off Plant 43 to potential buyers.”

It made sense – the alignment of the chairs, the water fountain, the lectern off an at angle in the corner.

“Stay sharp,” Chris ordered, glancing from Claire back to the window and then across to the others. “Miguel, you ok with the-“

“I am fine,” Miguel said briskly. He reached back, twisted a nozzle on the canister at his back then reached into his pocket for a lighter. As the others watched, he held it to the pilot light of his flamethrower, and it hissed into a small blue blaze of a flame.

Chris eyed him but signaled all the same and together they led the push out through the next door. Claire followed close behind, but Jill did not.

“You ok?” she asked. Carlos blinked down at her, her words registering perhaps a second behind the sound of her voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “Do we need to go over that ‘stop worrying about me’ thing again?”

The beauty of their masks was that they rendered expressions largely unreadable, but he knew her well enough to know the one she wore now. It nudged a hint of melancholy forth, like he’d recalled something comforting from his past, locked firmly behind the walls of time.

She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t, not here, not now. The separation of business and pleasure was something she excelled at; even this was a step too far off that beaten path.

So, he nudged her with his elbow and together they made their silent way back to the others.

* * *

Chris tried not to let his nerves get to him, but one or two were set on edge. He didn’t like it. He knew himself, knew his tolerances, and this was far from breaching even the lowest of them. During his days in the Air Force he had hunkered down under hails of bullets barely breaking a sweat, had trekked miles with an injured comrade hanging off his shoulder and only thought to complain when they both rested in the med tent back at base. Maybe this wasn’t quite the desert heat and organised strike he could have expected in those days, but nonetheless it was a situation that brought a harrowing sense of familiarity with it. This was what he was good at.

The only saving grace was not much of one at all – that the others seemed equally as spooked, and nobody seemed able to place a finger on why.

The final room en route to the greenhouse was a small lab that doubled as a maze of mirrors, samples of greenery and flowers of all colours growing in sealed containment and hydroponic trays behind electronic locks with unmistakeable biohazard warnings etched into the glass. The room itself was bathed in a gentle blue light, playing with the whites and the silvers of the furniture.

“Someone was really precious over their plants,” he joked.

Jill peered at them as she passed, observing them in that analytical way he had so often teased her about. The same way that had saved their asses back in the mansion and, he didn’t doubt, hers during her extended escape from Raccoon City.

“Huh,” she said, pausing before a plant with small, purple flowers wilting against bulbous black berries. “Belladonna.”

“Is that…holy shit that’s weed,” Claire said, choking on a giggle as Chris shot her a sudden, disapproving look.

“Nah,” said Carlos beside her. “That’s a castor oil plant. _That_ -“ he pointed a thick finger at a pile of dark green leaves locked in a clear Perspex box on a desk “-is weed.”

Jill’s eyes widened and she turned to another cabinet, and then another.

“These plants are all poisonous,” she pointed out.

“Fucking hell,” said Carlos, reaching out to pull Jill away from where she stood. “That’s borrachero.”

He nodded to another sealed box bolted to a desk near her elbow and the yellow tubular flowers that were stacked within, resting on a bed of leaves and vines.

“It’s airtight,” Jill said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve heard enough stories about that shit. Claire, you wanna take some photos?”

Claire obliged, pulling a disposable camera out of one of her many pouches and went about capturing everything that looked remotely unusual. Jill prodded at one of the computers but unlike the others they had found these were locked down solid.

“We’ll take another look on our way back,” Chris promised. This place gave him the creeps -the sooner they could be done with it, the better.

They approached the thick steel doors that led to the greenhouse together, assuming a haphazard formation that placed Miguel and his flamethrower at the front. Carlos was the demolition expert here, Jill the backup in case something happened to him or he fucked up, and Miguel was the plant wrangler. They knew their roles, knew what they needed to do – he didn’t need to insult their intelligence by running through the plan again.

“Dios mio,” Miguel gasped as they heaved open the heavy doors, sections of brown vine cracking away from the edges.

“Fuck me,” Chris echoed.

Plant 44, by all uncovered documentation, was a small plant. Plant 42 had been, and Chris had prepared himself for the same exponential growth 42 had shown prior to his run in with it, but he still gaped in awe at what lay before them.

Perhaps once the greenhouse was a splendid wonder of shining steel and white paint, but only flashes of what the architects had intended were visible beyond the layers of darkened green that grew across every surface. Vines wound their way around the railings of the catwalk that encircled the room, some dead, some flesh-like and gently moving, some thick and some barely the girth of a flower stem. Bulbous green sacs grew close to a central column, the tinge white flowers visible behind folded green leaves. From floor to ceiling it grew up walls, along support structures and across windows. It was a jungle, but where humidity should have brought forth an uncomfortable sweat, the air instead carried a chill that bored right down to the bone.

“This is bigger than 43,” Claire muttered.

“And 42,” Chris echoed.

He placed a tentative foot on the catwalk, listening to it creak and groan as he slowly transferred his weight onto it.

“Be careful,” he warned. “Looks like the plant growth has weakened the structure. Let’s do this quick.”

With light steps, Jill approached the railing and looked down to the final level, some thirty feet below.

“The entire lower level is covered,” she said. “We can’t get down there – if this thing is defensive we’ll be in trouble before we can set the charges.”

“Works in our favour,” said Carlos. “I don’t think we brought enough to cover this entire thing.”

He made his way further onto the catwalk and deposited the holdall in the centre, unzipping it to retrieve two blocks of C4 taped together and a small electronic component.

“This here,” he said, waving the blocks, “is C4. You find spots that look vital, you place it, you take one of these-“ he waved the device in the other hand “-you stick the pointy end into here like this – don’t worry, it ain’t gonna explode ‘til we tell it to – and then you move on to the next. One per area. Save a few for the next level up, and we’ll place a few in adjoining rooms upstairs, see if we can’t topple the structure in on itself just to be sure. I’d advise not touching the plant if you can help it – some of the shit we just walked past is toxic to the touch.”

“This detonates remotely?” Chris asked.

Carlos nodded.

“I have one detonator, Jill has the other. That way, if one of us bites it we can still complete the mission.”

“What if both of you bite it?” asked Claire.

Carlos patted the leftmost pouch on the middle row of his vest.

“I keep mine in here,” he said. “But I’d prefer it if you kept us alive.”

Claire laughed softly, and Chris rolled his eyes. Bad time for jokes.

He observed the others as they helped themselves to what they had, taking a moment to allow his nerves to calm and his centre to be found again.

It was cold in here, colder than in sick bay. They had all noticed the pattern of white veins covering every square inch of the greenery, morphing into a fizzy shell on the wilted parts. The smell had dissipated somewhat, for which he was grateful. Excerpts from Macintoshs’ diary played out in his mind, reminding him just how many people had met their ends in this room. They had to stay vigilant.

“It’s killing it.”

He jumped, swore and then took a moment to breathe deeply. Jill’s impeccable stealth apparently extended even to creaky catwalks.

“Look,” she said, dismissive of his momentary panic. He followed her finger to an area of brown at the very top of the structure. “The mold must be F-07. It’s feeding on the plant. I think that’s why it’s grown so big – it’s growing to accommodate the mold as it spreads. The mold has more to feed on and the cycle continues. Must be the T-virus they spliced in.”

Chris raised an eyebrow.

“You almost sound impressed.”

“Rebecca was right about it evolving. Look up there too – that’s a different plant. There must have been more than one plant in here and the mold covered it all. It’s not just Plant 44.”

There was no break in the spider-like veins that crept across the surface of the plant (or plants) – they formed continuous patterns winding around the cylindrical greenhouse, like a network of roads all leading back in on themselves.

“Let’s just get this done,” he said uneasily. “Kinda want to get out of here, have a beer, maybe a lie in tomorrow.”

“Amen,” Jill echoed.

Chris circled around the central column, placing his charge against one of the thin steel struts supporting the catwalk outside of a vine-covered door. A single pencil-thin tendril twitched against it as he pulled away, nudging the side almost lovingly before curling back into a nest of reddish leaves.

Done. Good.

He tapped on his PDA and traced a route up to the next level – they could retreat back the way they came and through a labyrinth of rooms and corridors, or they could push onward out the opposite side of the greenhouse, up an access stairwell and come out almost on top of themselves. Comfort or speed…either way, there were risks. But there had been no sight of zombies or any other BOWs despite spatters of evidence of their existence. It did not sit right with him, but he hoped it was simply a case of lady luck smiling at them for once.

A plan formed, he turned back towards the others. Claire was already snapping photographs of the thicket around them, the click and buzz of her camera loud in the muffled silence that surrounded them. Every so often something would creak or groan and a leathery shuffle would follow as some far-off section of wall resettled.

Miguel stood next to a broken section of railing, peering down into the soft detritus below. It was a hell of a drop, but he seemed not to notice, swaying gently on the spot, shoulders hunched, the flamethrower disarmed and resting on the catwalk at his ankles.

“Hey,” Chris said. Jill and Carlos turned, but Miguel continued to stare blankly into the void. “You okay?”

Moving closer, he could see the sweat pouring off him, soaking through the arms of his fatigues and drenching his hair. Behind the thick plastic of his mask, condensation settled.

“Miguel,” called Carlos when he didn’t answer. “No te ves muy bien, parce.”

The words rolled off his tongue fluidly, his Spanish as soft as his English was hard. Miguel turned at the sound of his mother tongue, and Carlos paled before the others caught sight of their fifth.

“ _Caliente_ ,” he panted. He swayed, calves dangerously close to the remaining rail just below knee-height. “ _Algo…aquí. No puede…respirar…”_

“Tómalo con calma,” Carlos responded urgently but with a degree of calm. “Sólo respire.” Then, faster, quieter: “Chris, call Rebecca – we’re gonna need a medic.”

But Chris’s hand didn’t make it as far as the radio at his waist before Miguel moved, raising an arm to rip off his respirator in one fluid movement. Someone screamed, and he inhaled deeply, a vision of relief passing over him.

Then, his eyes glassed over, suddenly unseeing. A single thick vein swelled against his temple, darkening as his skin paled, a network of pinks and purples flickering across his face like forks of lightning. For a moment, he just stood there, silent, peaceful almost.

“ _Gisela…”_

His final word left him as a breath, projected forward as his weight fell backward, sending his flaccid body tumbling over the broken railing. Jill dove forward but he was already gone, plummeting to the thicket of green below.

“Holy fuck,” Claire gasped. Chris barely heard her over the blood pounding in his ears.

They did not hear the _thump_ of Miguel’s body hitting the ground, but they heard the creak and _thwap_ of vines, suddenly animated. They felt the rumble of movement thirty feet below.

“We have to go,” Jill said, suddenly panicked. “Now, now, _now_!”

No sooner had her voice rang out, the central column began to move, a vine the thickness of Chris’s entire body winding itself loose from the others. The bulbous buds throbbed, their great rubbery leaves parting against bleach-white petals.

What followed happened in the blink of an eye. The Chris-sized vine, longer than the entire height of the room, slammed down on the catwalk. He heard the _ting_ of snapping metal, saw bolts fly before they felt the platform give way. The holdall tumbled to the detritus below, now rippling frantically as smaller, stubbier vines thrashed about.

Chris pushed himself backwards, grabbing Jill around the waist as Carlos’s heavy form hurtled towards them both. The platform they landed on seemed stable enough but the segment before them bent downward, the screech of metal under stress like nails on a chalkboard. Claire… _where was Claire?_

He cried out her name, her position across the other side of the yawning chasm revealed as the vine pulled away, back into itself and wound up slowly, not quite retreating. Her position was precarious, flat on her ass, palms splayed against the wobbling platform beneath her. The support beneath had snapped, the next segment up tilting at an increasingly threatening angle. She pushed down with her feet, tried to launch herself towards solid ground, but the final hold splintered, and the platform fell from beneath her.

Their screams coalesced and a recklessness he had known only for her overcame him. She couldn’t die, not like this, not while he sat there and did nothing. Not her, not Claire, not like this. _Not at all_.

Before he could do something stupid, before he could throw himself at her, someone else did. A black blur launched itself across the gap, collided painfully with the disjointed railing on the other side. Claire’s scream was caught in a strangled gasp and when Chris realised how close to the edge he had dragged himself, how he probably would have fallen anyway had Jill not locked an arm around him, his eyes darted up to see her dangling in mid-air, Carlos’s legs locked around her waist, a single meaty arm hanging from a solid stretch of railing above.

Chris watched helplessly as his sister clawed at the man above her, the railing that held them both screaming in protest. Another thick tendril separated itself from the central column amidst the crackle of dead branches.

“Carlos!” Jill called. “The platform!”

As he reached down, a bolt separated itself with a threatening _ting_ and the entire segment lurched forward. He barely caught himself, only just managed to grip the metal with both hands as Claire slipped further.

Chris looked around for something, anything he could use to get to them.

“Grab my hand!” Carlos shouted. His voice was stretched thin, fatigued.

“I can’t-“

“Yes, you can.”

And she did. His hand found the crook of her elbow and hers his and somehow, he was able to pull her up far enough that the other arm could wind around his neck and he could return both of his to the railing. But he didn’t – he held onto her until her own hands wrapped around the cold steel above them and pushed against her thigh until she was safely on solid ground.

The platform creaked again, dropped another inch. Carlos barely maintained his hold.

The vine above them swung back, flapped around the wall, smashed against glass somewhere.

“We have to go,” Jill said. Her voice was trembling, her hands too. Then, louder. “Carlos, you have to move!”

“Don’t think I _fucking know that_?” he shouted back.

Claire hooked her knee around a more stable section of railing, reached down and grabbed the buckles on either side of his vest. Somehow, between them, they managed to haul his weight to safety, scrambling back onto the far-most section before the previous one gave way completely.

They were safe – for now. But the gap between them was too wide, the risk too high. The vines swirled amidst a hail of glass, more creaked as they separated themselves from their cradles.

“Go,” Carlos shouted, pushing Claire back towards the door behind them. “We’ll find you, _go!_ ”

Jill tugged on Chris’s arm, but he didn’t need the prompt, dove back towards the doorway before Carlos and Claire had so much as opened theirs. It closed with a heavy _thunk_ behind them and Jill slid down a deadbolt on the bottom, and then another at the top. Beyond, they heard a cacophony of destruction as the plant doubtlessly crumbled what remained of the walkway. The door buckled slightly but maintained its hold, rattling a warning to them both.

“The fuck…” Jill panted.

Chris felt the comedown hit and adrenaline leave him high and dry. He didn’t need to look at his hands to know they were shaking. In his fevered mind he saw Claire fall, again and again. Beyond that, he saw a sixteen-year-old boy in baggy jeans and a well-worn band T-shirt open the front door to two solemn police officers, minutes away from a lightning bolt of pain that would rattle around in his chest for the next decade. He saw Forest, the flesh hanging from his face, lurching towards Jill, reaching towards her with the bones of his fingers.

“Chris?”

Jill’s gentle touch on his shoulder brought him back to the moment, but that bolt continued to slam against his rib cage.

“We have to get to them,” he said. “We have to-“

“I know,” she said in that reassuring way she had. And it was in her eyes too, that same fear, though she had always been better at hiding it than he was. “But we’ve got a problem we need to tackle first.”

She gestured to their surroundings and he realised that they were not in the hydroponics room. The door they had barreled through had taken them to a hitherto unexplored section of the labs, all desks and bookcases.

“Sit down,” Jill urged. “Catch your breath. I’ll look at the map, figure out where we are and how we can get to them. Knowing them, knowing Carlos, they’re already working their way back round. She’s in good hands, don’t worry.”

Chris did as he was instructed, leaned against a desk as he willed the worry away. But it didn’t listen this time, clung to the sides of his skull like moss. He didn’t like how out of his control this felt – yeah, he worried, he panicked, but he could always keep it in check. It felt like his brake lines had been cut.

The damn headache didn’t help.

“If I’m not supposed to worry, you shouldn’t either,” he pointed out. “’S only fair.”

He expected her to laugh but she continued to stare down at her PDA as she tapped it.

“Claire will be okay,” she promised. “Carlos would die before he let anything happen to her.”

That was her problem, her worry, her fear. She even shook her head as she considered this.

“Always has to play the fucking hero,” she muttered. Then, she set her jaw and looked up at him. “Before we set off, I asked him to give me some time before he left. Don’t know what I plan on saying to him, but I had to say something. I shouldn’t have done that. Fate isn’t that fucking kind to us.”

He stirred so much devotion in her, even now that she had convinced herself that their relationship was over. You didn’t leave things unsaid when it came to the people you cared about, not when you took on the risks they did. But now was not the time to remind her of that, and here was not the place.

The image of Claire falling played itself back yet again, but this time the focus shifted. Why had Carlos jumped? He’d almost got himself killed when his safety was assured. No part of this fit with the image Chris had constructed of this Umbrella agent, this infiltrator, but there was more to it than that – he’d not just saved her life, he’d recklessly thrown himself headlong into danger to save her. The gratitude he felt was immeasurable, the confusion even more so. How could he have been so horribly wrong all this time? Had he? Was the point that he now owed him? That they all did?

“Chris. Are you okay? You’re sweating.”

He fidgeted with the collar of his shirt.

“Just hot is all.”

Jill narrowed her eyes at him, stepped forward and raised a hand to place against his mask, checking the seal around it.

“It’s not hot in here. And your pupils are dilated.”

Irritated, he pushed her hands away.

“Jill, I’m fine.”

“Fine like Miguel was? Chris, something got to him. We knew him – he wouldn’t have just pulled his mask off like that.”

“The plant? The spores? We saw what they do to people – they didn’t affect him until he took off his mask. If I’d breathed something in, you would have too, we all would have.”

Jill stepped back, hands raised in surrender.

“I didn’t suggest anything. Just…let’s get out of here.”

He took point again, wiping his hands on his pants before readying his weapon, but he felt her eyes on him as they moved onward.

* * *

Claire asked Carlos why he did what he did, speaking in tones that were laden with the fear of someone who had written off their own life a heartbeat before it was handed back to them, gift-wrapped, and hadn’t a clue what to do with it now.

Truth was, he had no answer. He had seen her fall, had seen the possibility of a way that ended with her surviving and had acted on that before he’d really considered anything else.

“I thought for sure it was my time,” Claire had said.

She’d seemed so young in that moment, like more than two years separated them. He had almost reassured her, but her arms had unwound from her waist, a steely look upon her face, and he held his ground. In a few graceful movements she had pulled the elastic tie from her now-chaotic mess of hair, smoothed it down and pulled it back into a tidier tail. By the time she looped the final twist around her fingers, she held herself with her usual confidence, no hint of her former uncertainty.

They had left it at that, her not questioning him further and him accepting that she needed that moment of weakness before she could be strong again.

When they made it a safe distance away from the greenhouse, Carlos checked them both for wounds, interrogated her on how she felt physically, and made her sit silent and still on a desk as he pulled his personal med kit from one of his many pouches and began cleaning and dressing a gash in her arm. Funny, she’d not even felt the skin tear.

He was rough in a way military men often were, focused on tending to the wound rather than the patient, but he apologised every time he drew a wince from her. Then, and only then, did he sit back and take a moment to breathe.

“I can see why she likes you,” she said, the words leaving her mouth before they’d been filtered through her brain, as they often did.

Carlos raised his eyebrows.

“I’m flattered, but Chris would kill one of us if we explored that avenue,” he joked. “Probably me.”

She hit his arm a little harder than intended.

“I _meant_ you’re one of the good ones,” she clarified. “The reckless good ones. Like her. You see someone that needs saving, you don’t think twice. You make sure they’re okay before you even think about yourself. It’s something I’ve been noticing a lot since we met.”

“You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

“It can be. We both could have died there.”

“But neither of us did.”

There was something in the way he said it that solidified a previous unknown lurking in one corner of her chest. Revealed, it no longer festered, rather announced itself as just another part of an existing network of vital pieces. He was one of them, despite what Chris argued and insisted. A group so reckless in their search for truth and justice that tragedy felt more like a promise than a threat.

She recalled the days she had spent with Chris in Raccoon City, laughing with the other S.T.A.R.S. members. All Good People too, all willing to put their life on the line for something worthy. She thought of Jill, staying behind when she should have left and almost paying for it with her life. Steve, who hadn’t deserved any of what happened to him…who even she couldn’t save, not in the end.

She didn’t like feeling helpless, more so when it was others that made her feel that way. But she couldn’t change who he was, who any of them were. They were soldiers, she was not, and if she was going to work with them she needed to learn to accept that.

They allowed themselves to rest a few moments longer before cataloging their supplies and trying – and failing – to hail the others on the radio. Carlos had lost his rifle, Claire her radio, but between them they had enough 9mm ammunition to hopefully take care of any threat, assuming they hit most of their shots.

“Map shows a shorter route back to where we were,” she said when they were ready to move out.

None of this felt comfortable to her. Whatever feeling had latched on to them in the sick bay still hung thick in the air. Was that what had gotten to Miguel? Something was there, that’s what he had said. He couldn’t breathe…

Claire shook the thought away. She didn’t need that right now. They could grieve when they were out of here. It didn’t matter what had happened to him, they just needed to make sure it didn’t happen to them either.

Besides, if something had gotten to him, shouldn’t it have gotten to all of them?

She decided that it was something they probably shouldn’t dwell on too much and pushed it out of her mind as they emerged into what the map indicated to be Sector 4.


	9. Labyrinth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where they had previously longed for something, anything, to prove their fears correct and put an end to the ‘what if’s, now they wished for silence, if only to still the worry eating a hole in the back of their skulls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, chapters 9 and 10 were originally just chapter 9. But I had many words (I could have written many many chapters in the facility, trust me), so this chapter follows a very different format than planned. But...consider it part 1 of 2 :).

Something was wrong in Sector 4, that much was immediately apparent. A sense of dread hung in the air, raising the hairs on the back of Jill’s neck. It was the same feeling that had lodged itself into their bones as they approached the sick bay. The air was cold but thick and the further they plumbed into the depths of the sector the more pronounced that feeling became.

This area did not bear the eerie calm of the others. Entire corridors were blocked off by hastily-stacked equipment in a way not dissimilar to that of Spencer Memorial. Broken glass littered the floor, blood streaked the walls, bullet casings nestled in the dips of the floor tiles. A last stand had been made here, but against what? And where were the bodies?

“You smell that?” Chris asked, holding out an arm as they passed yet another blood-streaked barricade.

She did. That same damp undertone that had bypassed their filters in Sector 2. With it came a chill neither of them could quite explain.

“You know what’s bothering me?” she said.

“The blood?”

She nodded.

“So much for a peaceful death.”

Where they had previously longed for something, anything, to prove their fears correct and put an end to the ‘what if’s, now they wished for silence, if only to still the worry eating a hole in the back of their skulls.

Carlos was a capable man, he could handle himself. Claire was a strong woman, had proven that time and time again. Yet an unwarranted desperation tied to their fate propelled Jill forward, towards Chris reuniting with his sister and her scolding Carlos for doing exactly what she would have done given the opportunity.

It was her own fault. She never should have spoken to him or should have done it a hell of a lot sooner. She’d seen the movies, she knew how shit like this usually ended.

What troubled her more was the fact that she knew now exactly how she wanted that conversation to go. Seeing him here, back in action, stirred something deep within her, something that had been there as far back as Raccoon City. Whatever she felt, however much she needed to protect him, _they_ needed him here, fighting with them. And she needed to do whatever it took to make that happen, fear be damned.

These thoughts stayed with her as she and Chris pushed forward towards the mess hall – a room with many doors, at least three of which would place them on a route to reunite with the others.

“Charlie were heading this way,” Chris pointed out. “Not had any contact with them since we arrived. Not heard from Bravo in a while either.”

“Bravo weren’t diving too deep, they’re fine. Charlie probably just lost signal, like us.”

That was another thing. The signal that had previously been temperamental at best now seemed almost non-existent. Occasionally, Carlos’s private channel would buzz, and the faint ghost of a voice could be heard, but the main channel, the one that connected them to Bravo, was completely dead.

She tried one more time to hail them as they rested against the mess hall doors, ready to push in together. Nothing.

Chris met her eyes and for a moment they allowed the silence to carry an understanding that brought more comfort now than it ever had in their days with the RPD. Whatever they had gotten themselves into, she felt better for the fact that he was at her side throughout it.

They pushed into the mess hall with a clatter that disturbed a gathering of dining zombies – three of them, crouched low over a desiccated corpse, sucking on a dry and bloated string of intestines.

“About time,” Chris snarled, and took two of them out before Jill had even raised her weapon. The final one fell at her hands and slumped over the mess of bones and flesh that had been its last supper.

There was always a necessity in taking these things down, but it also encouraged a sense of sadness. Someone had loved these creatures once, held them close, comforted them. Perhaps right now, someone wondered where they were and would mourn their loss someday soon.

A ghost of pain burned through her left bicep, reminding her of a fate she had so narrowly escaped. History was repeating itself again, she realised – Carlos saving someone, barrelling into trouble like he was going for a strike; her chasing after him, hoping he’d live just long enough for her to explain something personal and profound. Only this time it was a little more than ‘thank you’, so the stakes must be proportionally raised.

That was the tale her brain wove, threading it through the cracks in her heart and refusing to be pulled tight enough to hold it together.

So much for calm and focused, she thought. So much for a clear mind.

The mess hall was larger than a football field by her estimation but now bore more resemblance to a maze than a cafeteria. Whatever last stand had occurred, the final act had evidently played out here. Tables had been upended, equipment dragged from labs and offices to block off large sections of the room like a shanty town. There were even sleeping bags in the corner nearest to where they stood, exposed by a fallen barricade, a few pale-skinned occupants still curled up peacefully inside, never to wake.

The same greenish-black mold that had set up home in sick bay was here too, padding out the ceiling almost to where they stood, growing in and over the makeshift walls, swallowing bodies and barricades into its mass. That horrible stench pervaded the air and Jill retched against it, swallowing bile to hold back the threat of vomit. Her head swam, vision too, and as she took in the sight before her, attempting to formulate a plan, she could have sworn a tendril of mold _moved_.

Chris was in far worse shape; he doubled over but caught himself before he followed in Miguel’s footsteps. Beads of perspiration clung to his forehead, and she felt it too – a raging fever despite the coolness of the air. An oppressing feeling of suffocation. The sense of an intruder in her shadow.

“Breathe only when you need to,” she urged, and inhaled before holding her own. Chris steadied himself and together they rushed for the first opening in the crusted maze before them.

* * *

There came a point where the furniture became indistinguishable from the organic mass, where that which grew on the ground met that which fell from the ceiling to form fragile columns. Needle-thin hyphae grew in threads around it all, more densely packed in some areas than others. There were bodies too, twisted in solid shapes, crusted with the stuff, the flesh blackened and the eyes hollow. The more they pressed on the more alien the scene became and even Chris with his nerves of steel had to bite back the urge to run, to head back to safety and trust in the others to make it back to them.

But this was Claire. He’d have walked into the fires of hell for her – now that hell turned out to be a freezer, he couldn’t check out like that wasn’t part of the deal.

Jill’s steely focus kept him going as the stench deepened and the ground crunched underfoot. They were deep into the thick of it by the time he realised that she had taken point.

There was something else mixed in with the earthy odour, something that pricked on memories he’d kept locked tightly behind thick, barred doors in his mind. It was a smell that couldn’t be filtered out by any apparatus because it leaked into your pores, clung to hair and clothing, and would not relent no matter how hard you scrubbed. It was the scent of death.

The halls of the mansion opened before him, the soft pad of mold beneath his feet now threadbare carpet soaked through with blood. The shadows of overlapping fixtures became torn and peeling wallpaper, and somewhere in the distance something howled.

Chris spun around, and the scene swirled, clung to his vision a second longer, then dissipated.

“Hey,” Jill hissed. “You okay?”

Was he? Absolutely not. But she’d think him mad.

“Yeah, just…thought I saw something.”

She did not press the matter, but her pace quickened.

The structure became more cave-like as they progressed, bridging the gap between furniture completely in some parts. Occasionally, a clearing would emerge, stacked with supply boxes, sleeping bags or a mixture of the two, sometimes patterned with blood, sometimes undisturbed. It was at the opening of one of these clearings that Jill froze suddenly enough that Chris almost walked into her.

“Oh no,” she gasped.

She lowered her weapon and darted forward, ducking under a fallen ceiling panel that dangled from a single frayed cable.

Chris followed, and emerged into a sea of red.

“Argent!” she called, knelt beside a twisted form from which a river of blood ran, winding between table legs to where he stood. “Fuck.”

They had found Charlie. Two of them, at least. Argent was splayed in the centre of a small clearing, a hand that didn’t belong to him but clutching one of their PDAs merely a few feet away. Argent’s skin was pale, the left side of his throat torn out, yellowish grey brain matter visible through a hole in his skull. His fatigues were torn roughly around his plate carrier, pouches ripped clean from where they had been attached, like something had attempted to burrow through but had met its match in the Kevlar.

“Granger?” Jill called. “Vasquez?” Silence. “Dupont, êtes-vous là?”

Chris approached the severed hand, pulled the PDA from the grip of stiffened fingers. The knuckles were blackened with small flecks of mold, and those threadlike veins of white had begun to emerge and creep down towards the wrist, the skin around them darkened and dry.

“Found Granger,” he said. “This is her wedding ring.”

He passed Jill the PDA and returned to the hand, slipping the silver band off the swollen finger, careful to avoid the mold. Her husband was gone, another casualty of this youthful war, but she had family who would mourn her.

“There’s nothing on here,” said Jill. “They must have come straight here and…”

And…what? What the hell had happened? Where were the other bodies? Where was the rest of Granger?

Jill didn’t see Argent move. Chris did. He saw a blackened hand shoot out, saw him double over with alarming speed and sink his teeth into the ankle that kept her upright mere inches from where he lay.

Chris raised his gun but Jill, startled, stepped back, tripped over Argent’s legs and went crashing to the ground, pulling the corpse out of the line of a bullet that impacted into a moss-like mound behind with a softened thud.

“Jill!” he cried out. Argent was already on top of her, teeth gnashing, head bobbing enough that he couldn’t get a clear shot. So, he pulled his knife from its sheath on his shoulder and rammed it deep into the creature’s skull.

He had expected the hard _thunk_ of metal hitting bone, perhaps even a muted scratch as the bone, softer as it so often was on these things, offered little resistance and the brain parted like pudding beneath it. Instead, barely half an inch of the knife wedged its way in and when he twisted, the top section of the skull ripped off, like the lid of a paint can.

Beneath the missing plate, above the brain, a thick layer of crusted mold grew, the white tendrils covering most of the visible surface. Then, it erupted in a haze of dust that rained down onto Jill as her own knife burrowed through it and deep into the soft tissue below.

Argent slumped over her, lifeless once more, and Chris hurried to pull him away.

“Are you okay?”

Jill coughed and spluttered, shook her head as particles of green tumbled from the plastic of her mask. The smell…oh God _the smell_. She pushed her hands into her hair, ruffled it about until nothing more fell from it, each propulsion of air behind her mask causing her vision to swim. By the time her senses returned, Chris was already checking her ankle, relieved to find that her boots had saved her from testing the effectiveness of the old vaccine.

“Fucking…gross,” she gasped. “What the fuck? What was that?”

Chris helped her to her feet, patted her down even as she wrestled his hands away. He checked her neck, her mask, blew a few remaining clumps of dust away.

A waft of stale air pushed through the filters of his own mask and a wave of inexplicable urgency hit, like the sudden blare of a siren only he could hear.

“We have to go,” he said.

“I know,” Jill said, wincing as she struggled to steady her breathing. “I…oh God. _Oh God…_ ”

Her eyes, darker than he recalled them being, widened in an almost cartoonish fashion, and as her hands gripped his shoulders, he tightened his grip on hers. He loved her, he realised then. Not in the way she loved Carlos, whether or not she realised that herself yet, but in the way he loved Claire, and Rebecca, and Barry. She was _family_ , someone to protect, someone to keep close, someone he could not, _would not_ abide being so afraid. The instinct rippled through him like nausea, sparking desperation, fear, anger – a maelstrom of emotions that were dizzying to attempt to consider in the time he tried to.

Jill pushed against him and he spun around, everything moving slower than he was used to, slower than felt normal. Behind them, the mold parted, crumbled away from whatever detritus the scientists had used for their failed barricade. It parted in human form, disintegrating to reveal the distinctive decayed form of a zombie. This one, however, bore the leathery blackened skin of the hand they had found in sick bay, the network of white veins crumbling and splitting as it moved. Its left shoulder was locked in place by a solid mass of pale calcified plating that extended up one side of its head. When it opened its mouth, rather than break, the plates held their shape and the jaw itself snapped down the middle to accommodate the movement.

“Run!” Chris shouted.

He fired at the creature, but the bullet simply buried itself in the calcified mass and the flailing monstrosity kept on coming, undeterred. Behind it, more pulled away from the walls, one severing itself at the waist as its hardened legs remained in place.

Jill bounded ahead, shot after shot echoing around them. Arms broke free from every surface, a skull twisted itself from the ceiling above, raining powdered bone down onto them and leaving the stump of a spinal column behind.

There were forks and bends, some walls they could climb over, others they could duck beneath, but they were running blind. The walls thinned as they pushed onward but the clatter of feet behind them grew ever louder – these things weren’t content with shambling, gained speed as they bounced from wall to wall, sending clouds of dust into the air at every turn.

Jill’s speed put a short distance between them, but it was all that was needed for their luck to turn sour. A crack in the organic mass to their left widened as pressure built behind it and something fell, starting a chain reaction that brought the entire section down. In the blink of an eye, the path between them was obstructed by what had once no doubt been intended to keep the survivors safe.

“Chris!” he heard Jill cry out.

“Keep going! Run!”

There was a break to his right, and he pushed through it, winding back parallel to the route they had torn down, hearing the shrieks of the undead on the other side of the wall, seeing limbs dragged between gaps in the crust. How much was furniture and how much was mold? He couldn’t tell.

A refrigerator wobbled as he passed it and an idea formed. He gripped the back, heaved with all his might, and it fell forward, dragging chairs and boxes with it. A cloud of debris rained into the air and when it settled arms reached over and under the blockade, pinned in place. Nothing advanced, and after a moment of uncertainty, Chris felt his heart thud to a less dizzying pace.

“Fuckers.”

* * *

Jill took only a moment to think as the path closed behind her. They couldn’t get to her here, but they were now all hurtling in Chris’s direction. Dozens of them, unrelenting.

‘Gotta run,’ she urged herself. ‘Gotta go, he’ll be fine.’

It was a voice she knew well but it whispered to her where it had previously screamed, suggested rather than ordered. But she listened to it all the same and stopped only when the last remaining sound was the crumbling of mold and the creaking of the makeshift jungle gym around her. Somewhere in the distance there was a rumble, and the walls around her trembled.

“Chris,” she panted, holding down the button on her radio. Then, when she realised she was tuned to the wrong channel and fiddled with the dial: “Chris?”

Silence. On the radio and in the air. Cold panic edged deep beneath her skin, scraped the bone. She sank to her knees, whether from exhaustion or despair, she did not know.

“I’m here,” Chris’s voice assured her.

She exhaled with one long breath that warmed the inside of her mask. There was no relief, but some comfort at the knowledge that he still lived.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Nuh-uh. Alive, though. For now. What the fuck happened here?”

“Fuck knows. Hell of a lot more than we bargained for though, that’s for God damn sure.”

“Can you see an exit?”

“I can’t see shit. You?”

Jill looked around, took in the shoulder-height walls of mold, the papers scattered across the floor, and the boxes of rotten food piled up against…

A filing cabinet lay on its back next to what looked to be a real, structural wall perhaps five feet from her. She hadn’t noticed it before, hadn’t really been looking. Beneath it lay Vasquez, fused with the metal by thick fingers of mold that grew over her chest and into her open mouth. Her eyes, white and ringed in purple, stared straight ahead, and a hand lay outstretched in a final plea for help that was never heard. The flesh around her face was chewed almost to the bone, but she was still more intact than what remained of the agent next to her, identifiable as Dupont only by the braided twists of fabric he had tied around a belt loop.

“I’ve found the others,” she said solemnly. “No exit though.”

Chris laughed, and she found that she did too. None of this was funny but what the fuck else were they supposed to do?

“How do we keep getting ourselves into this shit, Valentine?”

“Beats me, Redfield. What say we try and get ourselves out of it?”

“Stay on the channel, keep moving, be careful. You got flares?”

She checked the pouch by her left kidney, then pushed herself to her feet and looked around.

“I do but I don’t know how either of us are gonna see them – it’s like a cave in here.”

“Worth a shot. Still got our grenades so we can blast our way through if we need to.”

She didn’t like the idea of splitting up, never had, but recognised that they needed to spend their energy trying to find a way out of this rather than trying to find each other.

“Whoever finds the exit buys the beers?” she suggested.

Chris chuckled.

“We’re doing it properly if we make it through this,” he said. “I’m talking shots, dancing on tables, getting laid – you too, when you make up with your man.”

There was so much to unpack in his words, and she wanted nothing more than to sit there a while longer and dissect them. But the more she tried to think at all, the more nauseous she became. She tried to think of that eventuality, of drinks the way they used to knock them back in Bar Jack after a long shift, of shooting the shit with them all…of Carlos, looking at her the way he used to, and her smiling back at him. Funny how that’s all she wanted now, in the heat of danger, risks be damned. She didn’t want to run and hide, she wanted to be selfish, to make the most of whatever life would give them and fuck the rest. No regrets. That’s what Forest used to say – you wake up every morning like you didn’t expect to and fill your day with the things that make you happy like they won’t be there tomorrow.

Did he do that? Did he have regrets, in the end?

The buzz of a radio snapped her back to the present, and she reached to her belt to find that the light was red. A voice, hard but quiet, drifted through the winding paths ahead. As she ducked, cautious and discreet, the room span around her, the greens and blacks meeting the yellows and pinks and-

Jill shook her head and the sounds died. The colours muted but the nausea lingered. It reminded her of… No. She wasn’t…couldn’t…

She patted herself down, checked her ankle, scrutinised the cuts and bruises on her arms. Delicate fingertips traced the scar on her left bicep, came away red…

No!

No…her fingertips were clean. It was just a scar.

But the blood…?

No. There was no blood.

A dull ache throbbed in her temples. She felt drunk, almost, like the shots Chris had promised were already burning their way to her liver.

She forced herself to move, rested a hand on the solid wall.

The wall…that was it.

She looked up, squinted at where the mold had begun to flake away from the plaster. If they had reached the far wall, there should be doors close by on either side. There! A dim green light – a fire exit sign. She almost didn’t see it, camouflaged as it was, but it flashed like a lens flare, flowering into a radiant bloom before puffing out almost instantly.

The voice was back, drifting down the path behind her. The chill in the air settled on her spine like prisms of ice, and she checked her firearm, held it tight.

“Chris?” she called, but her voice cracked and died before it could go much further. “Chris?”

The voice fell silent. Footsteps crunched in its stead.

‘Run!’ a more familiar voice told her. ‘Get out of here, now!’

She dragged the soles of her boots over leaves of damp paper, scuffed divots in the moist mold carpet beneath her feet.

A figure emerged, clad in black over and under a navy blue shirt, two fingers pressed into its ear. It looked at her from behind a darkened pair of glasses and smiled.

“Fancy seeing you here, Jill,” it said.

* * *

Chris found himself almost back where they had started – he could hear those things shuffling around, unseen, somewhat placated now. Mentally, he found himself back in that forsaken mansion, and occasionally his eyes would back up that delusion. He walked until he reached what he could only assume was a real, solid wall, believing so only because when he pushed it nothing moved.

There were boxes of personal effects pushed under chairs and stacked against upended desks, filling gaps where they could. Some had been claimed by the mold, others drenched in blood. One was still clung to by its owner, a revolver gripped in his hand, brain matter flowering out from an exit wound in the side of his skull. He wore a respirator not too dissimilar from Chris’s own and it remained largely intact. He’d seen a few of those lying around.

Chris came to the conclusion that the scientists, lab technicians and general workers had all made their way here when things spiralled out of control. A single, defensible position, close to the food stores; it wasn’t a bad idea, neither was building barricades. Trouble was that something like this became a death-trap if the rot got in. What confused him was the fresh corpses, mostly untouched, some chewed on a little but only experimentally. There were gunshot wounds, lacerations; one lady bore a knife buried deep in her vertebrae, another six entry wounds peppered across her back.

He was looking at a crime scene, the kind he often saw in Raccoon City, back when his life could still be considered normal.

These people killed each other.

He reached for the box that his dear deceased friend clung to and wrested it from his grip – manila folders filled it, all stamped with the Umbrella logo and designated a number.

“They hoarded their research?” he muttered.

There wasn’t a lot to peruse, mostly illegible handwritten notes and a few personal diaries, but he found one of interest.

**_Trial Alpha_ **

_Subject: Caucasian Male, 24.  
Subject reported violent hallucinations following ingestion. Visual, auditory and olfactory hallucinations were reported, but not tactile. Unlike those exhibited by subjects in the control group, these hallucinations did not appear to be influenced by the environment. Nature of the hallucinations was exclusively negative._

**_Trial Beta_ **

_Subject: Causacian Female, 36.  
Subject reported violent hallucinations following inhalation of spores. As with subject Alpha, visual, auditory and olfactory hallucinations were reported. Hallucinations were exclusively negative. Subject was unwilling to undergo trial a second time._

_Symptoms appear between 1-3 hours following ingestion and between 2-60 minutes following inhalation, depending on concentration of F-07 the subject has been exposed to. Effects vary dependent on dosage, from mild to severe. Subjects with **[redacted]** antibodies reported more moderate hallucinations and longer time to effect._

**_Trial Omega_ **

_F-07 has proven unable to infect living subjects, however exposure to late stage **[redacted]** subjects has yielded interesting results. We theorise that the lower body temperature of these subjects allows for proliferation of the fungus. **[redacted]** exposed to F-07 see **[redacted]** followed by **[redacted]** and later **[redacted]**. These subjects show enhanced aggression and toughness – will refer to Paris team for further investigation once our research has concluded._

_Viability of F-07 as it was intended is negligible, however further applications should encourage continuation of the project. **[redacted]** is not deemed viable or worthy of further research – while **[redacted]** appears capable of mutating strains of fungus and plant life, exposure through spores does not carry the necessary payload required for **[redacted]** , likely adopting qualities from the host that require low ambient temperature for proliferation._

Chris scowled at the thick black ink blotting out words that seemed pretty damn necessary for understanding of whatever ‘Trial Omega’ was. He held it up to the blinking light above him but could discern nothing of what had once laid beneath.

Peering into the box, he noted a black marker nuzzled against the side – whoever had ‘rescued’ these notes seemed pretty adamant that nobody should ever understand them.

He flipped the paper over, looking for something, anything that would be of use. There was something else beneath the printed text – a scribbled note, written with a trembling hand.

_Allowing F-07 to infect Plant 44 was a disaster. I’ve heard the nurses talk, I’ve seen their faces… It’s not just a bad trip this time, it’s a fucking nightmare, one that kills you. That isn’t a noble death. It’s the worst fucking one I can imagine. F-07 has started growing across S4 too, uncontrollably, and the fucking T subjects got loose. The filters we have aren’t good enough either – the spores are too small. It gets through slower, but it still gets through in the end. They’ve adapted some high-grade filters in engineering but there’s no way in hell I’m going down there. People are going mad, inhaling enough 07 to turn them against each other or send them running straight into 44. Those that do… Fuck, I ain’t going out like that. I’d rather be eaten by one of those things. Call me a coward, but this is the kindest way out._

_The F project was a mistake. God help us all…_

A thump drew his attention, and he shoved the paper into his pocket. Howls sounded in the distance, cacophonous and shrill. The squawk of crows somewhere overhead filtered down through the layers of mold.

_It was Jill’s sudden cry that brought him outside. It wasn’t a scream of terror, rather of surprise, but they’d lost enough friends tonight for him to be content in her ability to handle herself and risk losing another._

_She was on the floor when he found her, pinned beneath one of those creatures, this one still juicy and glistening in blood so red he feared it was hers at first glance. Meaty strips of flesh had been severed from its arms, some missing completely, others hanging down like party streamers, smearing red against Jill’s pale skin. The hair, long and matted, had been ripped out in clumps, and a single eyeball dangled from its socket, wobbling from its sinewy thread as the thing gnashed its teeth and dripped saliva onto its prey._

_Chris froze. Jill was holding the thing at bay, her hands on its shoulders, fingers burrowed into pockets of flesh. Beneath her grip he saw what remained of a very distinctive military tattoo, and his brain filled in the rest._

_Forest._

_His brain allowed him no time for his heart to process his grief before he fired. Forest’s brains exited the back of his skull with enough force to paint the pillar behind him, and the rest of him slumped forward, resting there for a moment of peace before Jill pushed him aside and he rolled onto the floor, head back, eyeless sockets staring into the stars._

_The face…it was beyond recognition. Maybe it was for the best, Chris would realise in the days that followed. Maybe it was better that he remembered his friend as the smiling, joking man he was and not this grinning corpse._

Chris winced and willed the memories away. He was done with them, that’s what he’d sworn. Forest was gone, dead, his corpse incinerated along with the rest of the mansion. He’d learned to accept that some time ago.

The shuffle of footsteps ahead brought him back. Good. Maybe burying a bullet in one of those things was just what he needed right now. He found it up ahead, swaying to its own rhythm, waiting for something (or some _one_ ), the echo of its blood dripping onto a section of tiled floor almost deafening. Another member of Charlie – the black of its uniform gave it away, the-

Charlie were all accounted for. Dead. Gone. One with the mold.

The creature turned, but by then he’d seen the red hair, felt his gut clench so hard he felt he might actually vomit this time.

“Claire?”

* * *

Jill ran. She didn’t know what else to do. Never one to run from fights, she also knew when one was lost before it began, and this definitely fit in that category. She’d not seen this new Wesker, but she’d seen Chris’s bruises weeks after their fight – there was no way she could take him on, not alone, not at half brain power. She needed a plan, needed…

A bullet thudded into the wall ahead and she dove right, scrambled across the floor to an upturned water cooler.

“You never were this shy, Jill,” Wesker taunted. She could hear the smile on his words, but she swallowed down her fear.

She scooted over to another barricade, crawling across the mold-ridden floor to press herself into a clean section of wall – another upturned desk.

Where the hell was Chris? Surely he had heard him. Was he even still alive?

Her chest seized, lungs burned. She needed to tear that damn mask off, but the image of Miguel falling, of how the spores had affected him, remained with her. She’d made peace with the fact she wasn’t likely to die in her sleep, and she felt it was only fair that extended to her current predicament.

She needed to find Chris and get the hell out of here so they could…

Carlos.

Oh God.

It was happening. Her dream. Her nightmare. It was coming true – a twisted prophecy she couldn’t avoid no matter her efforts.

She tried to picture him; his smile, his laugh, the way both those things made her feel. She collected her memories of him, as though preparing to present them to whatever God might be listening and say ‘look, look at this man – save him, protect him’, her own life on the altar. It was a blind panic and then and there she could make no sense of it. An instinctual reaction? Protect the good that is left in this world, no matter the cost?

‘You can take him,’ whispered the voice in the back of her mind, cutting her short. ‘And if you can’t then fuck it, that’s a hell of a way to go.’

Like a new set of batteries had been slapped into her spine, she felt a rush of energy that brought a clear sort of focus.

‘Fuck that monster. Fuck him and everything he’s done. Fuck everything he’s ruined, everything he’s taken from you. Take it back. Kill him now and this is all over.’

He was pacing the maze ahead – she could hear him lift furniture and tut when he found nothing. The mold here was pink and purple, yellow and orange. It was every colour and none at the same time. It grew in patches, sparingly. It made her think. Wesker did not wear a mask. Was he immune to it? Was this mold different to that which grew on the plant? Was this not ‘Kruger’, the toxic sedative, as Dr. Macintosh had referred to it in his journal? The more she considered this, the quieter the movements beyond became, and the colours seemed to drain from the scenery, reverting to the same palette of greens and greys and black and white.

Jill gripped the handle of her knife and pulled it from its sheath on her calf. Yeah, she was sick of running, sick of chopping her life into pieces and handing it to the enemy, sick of poking too deep into her psyche and welcoming in those that had no place there.

The footsteps grew closer.

“Found you!”

She jumped out, brought her fist down with enough force to drive the knife down to the bone.

The ground rose up to meet her, the image of her former Captain dissipating as she touched it. She looked around, sprawled on the floor. The furniture remained as it was, nothing disturbed or moved. The mold was the same black and green it had been before, and the fire exit sign…it glowed in a pretty ordinary manner.

“The mold…”

She looked at her hands, touched her mask, jumped to her feet, and patted herself down. She was covered in the stuff, had taken a blast right in the face when Argent’s head had exploded.

It was the _fucking_ _mold_. None of this was real.

A gunshot rang out not far ahead, towards the direction she needed to be. Nearby, something stirred. The furniture groaned, shrieks grew from nothing to an alarming crescendo in seconds, and she could almost feel the ground move beneath her feet as though some ancient evil had woken from its slumber deep below the Earth.

She ran, barely snatching herself from arms that pushed their way out of bulbous cocoon-like protrusions along the way. This section was clearer, she could even vault over some of the obstacles. She saw a fallen section of wall, saw the creatures now crawling over it and themselves, reaching out to her as she gained speed.

It was not far past here that she found Chris, crouched and holding something in his lap. She stopped just shy of him and called his name, but he did not even acknowledge her presence.

“They’re gone…” he said. His voice cracked – was he crying?

The fear returned, this time pulling her to him, a comforting hand against his back.

“She’s dead,” he muttered. “Claire. I couldn’t…”

She saw now what he held to him, almost lovingly. It was a corpse. A fresh wound punched a hole through to the back of its head, its blonde hair soaked in crimson. She didn’t know the person it once was, and he didn’t either. Yet he held it to him like if he let go a fate worse than death would befall them both.

“Chris…”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Apology after apology tumbled from his lips. So lost in his own grief was he that he seemed blissfully unaware of the horde that had begun to punch through the wall behind them.

“Chris, that isn’t Claire,” Jill said.

His head snapped up and he glowered at her, clutched the thing tighter to him, possessively now.

“Look!” she insisted, and she pushed the blonde hair out of its face. “It’s this mold; it’s making us see things that aren’t real. But I’m real, you’re real, and those things that are about to come crashing in here – those are real too.”

Chris looked back down at the corpse and cried out, then dropped it and scooted backwards, trying to put as much distance between him and it as he could.

“The fuck?” he cried. “What the fuck? Jill, it was her, I swear, it was-“

“I know that’s what you saw. I know. But it’s not. Claire is still out there, and she needs you, so we have to go.”

It took only a moment for his brain to rewire itself. He looked at the corpse again, at Jill, then at the crush of mold-zombies advancing on them.

“There’s a fire exit ahead. If we can make it there we’re home free.”

Chris nodded, and they took off together, pushing aside debris that got in their way.

The rumble of creatures slamming against the faux-walls grew louder as they pressed on and the entire structure wobbled precariously. Their route gave way to a clearing next to the fire door, boxes upon boxes piled up next to it, their weight sagging the damp cardboard. This area was largely untouched by the mold save for that which grew up the walls, and they could see the bodies on the other side of the barricades. Some saw them and reached through the gaps, others pushed on harder, crashing into one another and setting the entire structure trembling.

The mold must have covered them post-mortem, Jill realised. That’s why they couldn’t see them – they were hiding in plain sight, waiting for any sign of life.

A crack like a gunshot rang out, and the barricade behind them folded, the desk that had propped it up splitting in half. It tumbled, and Jill screamed as Chris shoved her in the small of her back and the avalanche took him down with it. She heard his head hit the ground, even as the caterwauling rose and she stumbled towards safety.

“No, no,” she cried. She was at his side in a heartbeat, but his body was limp, legs pinned beneath the debris. He was out cold.

Pulling her firearm from its holster she fired a shot into the forehead of the creature that reached for her, climbing over the debris that pinned her partner, and a soft puff of dust shot from the exit wound.

“C’mon, Chris,” she growled, shaking him. Another creature reached out and she pushed that one back too, but where it fell two more appeared. They had bottle-necked themselves, unable to advance but even as they did so, others at the back grasped and clamoured in desperation, pulling themselves up and over the blockade.

Jill pressed a boot to the edge of the half-desk that lay over her partner’s legs and pushed, the weight doubled with that of the body atop it. She fired another two shots as bloodied fingers groped a little too close for comfort. The weight shifted when she pushed again, and she grabbed the holster on Chris’s legs, pulled him sideways to freedom.

Freedom? She almost laughed. The door was right there, but so were they. She floored two more – she couldn’t have many bullets left and in the time it would take her to reload one of them could easily have torn her throat out. Or Chris’s.

So, she hooked her hands under his arms and hauled his weight towards the door. It was no easy feat, but the smooth tile beneath them at least facilitated the slide. When her backside pressed to the fire door, she raised up an arm and slammed it against the bar. The door gave way and she fell into the hallway beyond.

The creatures ahead moved still, clawing their way over the barricades and over their kin, flopping down onto the floor and not even attempting to stand, merely crawling towards their next meal. Jill dragged Chris backwards with everything in her, the joints of her shoulders screaming, and when she could ignore the impending horde no longer she dropped him, lunged for his belt, ripped free a grenade, and threw it into the mess hall as she flung her body across his.

1…2…3…

The walls shook, a roar spinning into a dizzying whining tone. A hand skidded to a stop inches from them, and only when the dust settled and no other sound followed did she raise her head to observe the damage.

The doorway was blocked, the wall partially collapsed. But there were no spaces large enough for them to crawl through, no precipice for them to pull themselves over.

Jill looked at her partner, then let her head fall to his chest, the steady rise and fall reminding her to, at long last, breathe.


	10. Hush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire tried her best to shake the cobwebs from her mind, but even with a thorough dusting the spiders remained and began to spin anew. She didn’t want to speak up, not now that she knew the truth.
> 
> This place reminded her too much of Raccoon City, and of the Antarctic Research Facility. Three labs, three disasters. The unchallenged arrogance of Umbrella angered her. How had nobody sought to hold them to account before now? Why was it up to them to mop up this mess?

Dr Emmett Macintosh graduated top of his class, with all the merits and accolades such a thing usually entailed. He’d secured a role at a top hospital, with pay as lucrative as one could wrangle within the NHS, before moving on to a private company and doubling his yearly salary overnight. For many years he had published paper after paper with very little fanfare, the limits of ethics and codes of conduct holding him back from what he would frequently assure himself was greatness. Then, Umbrella came along, with their nice numbers and promises of nurture over restraint. A move to Spain, too.

What he had not envisioned when he had accepted that offer was a lab in the arse end of nowhere, research that focused on plants and fungus of all things, and a schedule that meant he spent most of his days underground. But even that was a million times better than the end of the stick he grasped at now, emerging from a shared restroom with his fingers around the grip of a pistol he’d stolen off some poor idiot who no longer needed it. He had three bullets left, one of which he was saving for himself. The last of the unexpired food had ran out two days ago and he’d be damned if he had survived this long just to starve to death.

That day, something changed. As he followed his usual route from the restroom to the small lab he had set up camp in, he heard footsteps, and not the shuffling type of the escaped T-subjects.

Voices echoed down the hallway, muffled but speaking English and…accented in American?

Hope and fear flooded him in equal measure, but the latter kept him rooted to the spot, raised his arms to aim his firearm at the fork in the corridor.

Two figures emerged, clad in black tactical gear devoid of patches or insignia, clutching weapons not dissimilar from his own, and wearing respirators that looked a little primitive compared to the lab stock but effective all the same.

“Drop it,” the taller figure commanded, whipping around so fast Emmett probably would have shit himself had this altercation occurred twenty minutes previously.

The man pointing a pistol in his direction was taller than him by a good half a foot, broad shouldered and built of muscle. Dark, wavy hair that extended almost to his jawline was kept out of his face by a blue bandana, olive skin perhaps enough to convince Emmett that he was a Spaniard were it not for the strength of his accent. Beside him stood a girl, red-haired and fair, only a little shorter than the doctor, and possibly young enough to be his daughter.

“I…” Emmett stuttered. Then, he raised both of his hands, his right still holding the gun but no longer pointing it at the newcomers. “It’s about bloody time. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been stuck down here? You promised ‘prompt retrieval of personnel’ in the event of a biohazard – this isn’t fucking prompt!”

The man looked to the woman, then lowered his own weapon.

“You a scientist?” he asked.

They really knew how to pick them, didn’t they?

“Emmett Macintosh,” he said. “ _Dr._ Emmett Macintosh, virology.”

“There any more of you down here?”

“Not that I know of. The ones that didn’t die in their sleep got butchered by those…things.” He paused, considered his situation, and what the late arrival of such a small rescue team implied. Fortunately, he was smart, had planned for this. “Look, I know they probably sent you to retrieve the data, not to rescue personnel. But here’s the thing – there is no data. The T-samples are gone, base for F-07 is gone and good fucking luck getting cuttings of 44. I wiped the central server bank – everything we have is on a single floppy disc and in here.” He tapped the side of his head. “You want that data? It only leaves this facility with me.”

* * *

Dr. Macintosh had balls, Carlos gave him that. It was a smart survival strategy, and it played in their favour – no data for Umbrella to retrieve, and maybe they could talk him into testifying against them in exchange for protection.

So, he and Claire played along with his assumption that they were an Umbrella-sponsored rescue team and followed him back to his makeshift base of operations to gather themselves and figure out the next stage of their plan.

“You never told me your names,” Dr. Macintosh said as he checked a device on the wall before removing his respirator. “You can remove your masks, by the way – extraction should have taken care of it all by now.”

Neither of them moved, and he laughed.

“Fair enough,” he said. “Look, you’re gonna need new filters for those things. The ones you’ve got will filter out 44 but you’re fucked if you run into 07.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Claire. “And while we’re on the subject, what the hell was going here?”

Macintosh had opened a cupboard and was rooting around inside a large cardboard box within.

“They didn’t tell you?” He eyed them suspiciously for a moment then shook his head, an expression of unsurprised disbelief falling over him. “Figures. Tell you what, give me your names and the promise you won’t tell them I told you and I’ll talk. Haven’t had a proper conversation in weeks, I’m ready to talk your ear off, believe me.”

“Diego,” Carlos said, defaulting to his old nom de guerre. The simple acknowledgement of that name brought with it a level of discomfort that had him adjusting the collar of his shirt.

“Sherry,” said Claire, playing along.

“Diego and Sherry,” Macintosh repeated with a laugh. “Well, you’re both out of luck – I’ve got filters, but none that will fit your masks. I’m guessing you’re from USA, not Europe – wouldn’t kill them to have consistency in their equipment.”

He pushed the box back into the cupboard and it rattled loudly as it hit the back wall. When he picked up his own mask again, he pointed to the filters on the side, larger than their own, with the Umbrella branding and standard font printed in white on the side.

“We figured out that we needed these ones too late,” he said. “Half the facility was dead by that point, half of the ones who were left were waiting their turn, and half of the ones left after that had lost their minds.”

“You never answered the lady’s question,” Carlos said, pushing the point. “What were you working on down here and what the hell happened?”

The doctor eyed them again. Even before he spoke, Carlos knew that they were about to get a shaved down version of events – just enough to gain their trust, but not enough that he would be rendered useless.

“Two main threads of research: botany and mycology. Neither, might I add, were my areas of expertise so none of _this_ is my fault. Botany were working on replicating and building on research that got lost in Raccoon City. Mycology were the breadwinners here. USA are all into their viruses, Paris are in bed with their parasites, so we wanted to try something new. First, it was looking into spore-dispersal methods for T, then the research turned into areas certain agencies within your own government were very interested in. All you need to know is that the fungus got out, infected the plant, and the spores from the resulting monstrosity will put you into a sleep you won’t wake up from. Not a peaceful one, either. I’m talking Nightmare on Elm Street shit here. The fungus on its own is a problem too – it’s grown unchecked all over the facility, growing on and around any living tissue below 15c. The spores from that will give you a bad time but won’t directly kill you – it heightens negative emotional responses, like a trip that’s always bad.”

“How bad?” asked Claire.

The doctor laughed.

“Worst fears come to life bad. Enemies abound, paranoia through the roof. A bunch of our guys killed each other last time that thing got loose. Your respirators will filter out most but not all of it – tiny particles, you see. Just keep your mask on and try not to breathe when you walk past it or you’re in for a bad time.”

Carlos looked to Claire and their eyes locked, an understanding passing between them.

“We found the fungus in sick bay,” he explained. “It got one of our team - how come it hasn’t affected us?”

Dr Macintosh twitched, took a step back away from them, fumbling for the weapon shoved into the waistband of his dress pants.

“You been hearing voices? Seeing things? Sweaty, nauseous, light-headed, paranoia?”

“The last two, a little. Pretty standard for being in a mess like this though.”

At this, the doctor relaxed enough to ignore his weapon, but not enough to close the gap between them.

“Guess you didn’t get a high enough dose,” he said. “Your friend take their mask off?”

“Only for a second.”

The doctor looked thoughtful.

“His first assignment?”

“How’d you know?”

At this, the doctor relaxed even further, enough to rest lazily against a desk a little closer to them.

“T-resistance was a major factor in onset of symptoms in trials,” he explained. “No idea why, but if your mate hadn’t had any exposure to T before then, he was just shit out of luck. Moreso if he removed his mask, even for a second.”

The doctor fidgeted with the hem of his lab coat.

“Have you seen any of the T-subjects yet?” he asked. “They broke containment not long after shit hit the fan – I heard the gunfire, saw the blood. Must be dozens of them by now, maybe hundreds.”

Carlos shook his head.

“Nothing so far – how many subjects were there?”

“Ten. But it passes quickly when you get dumb scientists running around screaming their heads off.”

The doctor pointed out the main points of interest on a map taped to a whiteboard against the back wall of the small room, and Carlos transferred the information to his PDA. Areas of F07 growth, areas the spores from Plant 44 was known to have reached (“Just blacklist all of sectors three and four”). He even pointed out barricades he knew had been set up. The only two straight routes out from their position were through the mess hall, which Dr. Macintosh warned against with a pale face and trembling voice, and a service access corridor upstairs that ran along the edge of the greenhouse but offered a straight route to the exit – this had not been visible on the visitor map they had been using.

“I tried to make a break for it early on but chickened out when I saw 44 had grown through there, and locked the door from this side,” he said. “It still isn’t my first choice, but it sounds like the only option we’ve got left.. Just gotta be careful because the infrastructure is weak in there – I don’t know how much 44’s growth will have affected it.”

They checked their ammunition stock, tried once again to contact the rest of their team, and then set out for safety.

* * *

Claire tried her best to shake the cobwebs from her mind, but even with a thorough dusting the spiders remained and began to spin anew. She didn’t want to speak up, not now that she knew the truth.

This place reminded her too much of Raccoon City, and of the Antarctic Research Facility. Three labs, three disasters. The unchallenged arrogance of Umbrella angered her. How had nobody sought to hold them to account before now? Why was it up to them to mop up this mess?

Carlos picked up on the change in her behaviour, but he said nothing. He’d seen how the colours had begun to change around them, how the light that refracted off the tiles was a rainbow of pastel shades that no trick of the eyes could have conjured.

Miguel had taken his mask off in sick bay, breathed this shit in straight. Carlos felt the urge too – the claustrophobia brought on by what he now understood to be chemical paranoia. He had to blink consciously every now and then to clear his vision, and repeated a mantra in his mind.

‘Question everything. Your eyes could be playing tricks on you. Don’t-‘

_“!Gran Diego!”_

Carlos froze. The voice, high-pitched yet soft, brimming with excitement, drifted into his ears like a discordant melody.

_“!Mama, mama, Gran Diego está aquí!”_

No, not into his ears. Through his mind. It wasn’t real. None of this was real.

He paused, waited for another call, waited for the voice to _insist_ on existing.

A hand, gentle and tentative, appeared on his arm.

“You need a moment?” Claire asked.

He shook his head.

“I think…maybe we did breathe some of that shit in after all.”

She met him with an expression so sombre he knew she’d heard them too. Maybe not the same voices but voices all the same.

“Then we get each other through this,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. “Just don’t let Dr. Feelgood know, yeah?”

Carlos nodded and swallowed, but the lump in his throat remained. Of all the voices…

_“¿Diego, eres tú?”_

He grunted, closed his hand around the grip of his pistol until a dull ache set in. He never should have used that fucking name.

“The service corridor is up ahead,” said Macintosh as they approached a fork in the corridor. “We need to walk past the mess hall, just…don’t go in there. Don’t even open the doors. No matter what you hear.”

“Why?” he asked. Anything to focus on.

Macintosh seemed frustrated. He was an average man in all respects – height, weight, age. His dark hair had begun to thin on top but not enough that his scalp was visible, his frame well-kept but bearing the signs of someone who had spent half his life eating healthily and then one day decided that it just wasn’t worth it anymore. He was the kind of man anyone would have walked past in the street. But his movements and expressions were so animated, Carlos couldn’t help but see him as a sort of caricature when he gesticulated wildly as he did then.

“Because half the bloody lab piled in there when shit got _really_ bad,” he said. “They de-furnished most of the labs on this floor, took as many supplies as they could handle and didn’t check anyone for bites. Didn’t check the vents, either. I was going to join them myself until I heard the screams and saw the security feed. That place belongs to the mold now, and if it’s calcified on the Ts, killing them’s gonna be a struggle. Shit’s like armour.”

“Sorry I asked,” said Carlos, not above sarcasm.

They were a few paces ahead, approaching a section of hallway littered with bodies and debris, before he realised that Claire had stopped. She stared dead ahead, eyes unfocused.

“Hey,” he said, low and gentle. “You okay there?”

“He’s…” she breathed. She swallowed in a deep movement that rolled her shoulders. “I can hear him… I think-“

“That’s in your head,” he said, firmly. “You know that. Fight it, don’t-“

_“Diego,”_ the voice insisted, sensing an in. It wound around his senses, lulled him back to a place that brought him nothing but pain. _“Carlos… ¿No nos extrañaste?”_

“Don’t listen,” he insisted, unsure which one of them he was truly trying to convince. “They’re _not real_.”

Something in his voice caused her to snap back to the moment, and she looked him in the eye, shame and sympathy coalescing into something akin to a fearful pity.

“You didn’t hear that?” she asked. “A voice…crying for help.”

Carlos shook his head, gripped her arm now, tight enough that if she tried to flee he could catch her.

“Not _that_ voice,” he said.

“What if they are real? What if-“

“They’re not.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because the people I hear are dead. The kind of dead you don’t come back from. We already lost Miguel, fuck knows where Jill and your brother are, and I sure as hell ain’t losing you here too so you have to stay with me.”

They stared at each other for a few, long seconds. Claire blinked first, her shoulders sagged, and she looked away.

“C-Diego,” she said, eyes drawn to something in the hallway ahead. “Do you see that?”

He followed her gaze, along the tiles and over the debris, to two bodies motionless amidst the chaos. He almost didn’t recognise them, covered as they were in a fine powder, but with Claire’s prompt the fractured shards pulled together to form a complete image.

With no reluctance, he released Claire, and Macintosh shouted at both of them, his words bouncing off and away with no attempt to acknowledge them. Then, he ran after Claire, sinking to his knees beside the fallen forms of their teammates as a new kind of chill settled into his bones.

Chris lay flat on his back, one arm stretched across the debris-strewn floor. Jill lay atop him, and as soon as Carlos reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder she jumped with a sharp inhalation of breath.

His heart, previously netted in some prickly prison somewhere in his gut, shuddered back to life. For a moment, he had been looking at her unmoving on the stretcher in Spencer Memorial, wondering if she’d ever wake and how much of her would remain when she did. He’d known then that he’d follow her to the ends of the Earth, even if she didn’t ask. He’d sworn to himself and whatever God might be listening if they could help her pull through he would do everything in his power to ensure that if only one person got out of that hellhole it was her.

It was the only time in his life he could recall voluntarily praying, and he hadn’t thought too deeply into it at the time, but there in the hallway of a new forsaken place, he saw the reason behind it all, as fledgling as it had been back then. It brought his hands to her face, checking her mask before anything else, and it sent heat throughout his chest and along his limbs when she threw herself at him, the filters of her own mask digging painfully into his shoulder. Whatever he felt, he was glad in that moment that she was alright, and he never wanted to let her out of his sight again.

“You’re ok,” she breathed. Then, she caught herself, pulled back and looked at Claire. “You’re both ok!”

A groan from beneath them stole any further attention and Jill released him to turn to her fallen partner.

“Hey!” she hissed down at him. “You with me?”

Chris raised his hand, but Claire caught it mid-way through the air and he blinked up at her.

“Sherry,” she whispered hastily. “It’s me, _Sherry_. Why’d you have to go give me a heart attack like that?”

“What happened? Where am I?”

“Fucking dumbass,” Jill breathed through wheezing laughter. “You went and got yourself knocked out and I…I…dragged your ass out of there.”

As Chris sat up debris fell from his hair, now a shade of powdery grey that aged him thirty years. He looked around, took in his surroundings, the newcomers, and then reached out and grabbed Claire’s hand tightly.

“Yeah, I remember…” he groaned. Then, he let out a soft laugh of his own. “Seem to recall saving your ass in the process so I’d say we're even.”

* * *

  
Dr Macintosh insisted on taking them through decontamination before they did anything else. There was a lab not too far off their route, almost completely devoid of furniture but home to an entrance that sprayed them all with a fine mist as they passed, and then again on their way back.

The doctor wasn’t sure how much good it would do, but he was apparently a ‘rather safe than sorry’ kind of guy. The trips, he had assured them, were often short-lived but as long as they kept breathing that stuff in they’d keep falling back into it and the higher the dose the more intense the hallucinations were. He’d then insisted that they wait half an hour before setting out – as he said, he didn’t want anyone ‘tripping balls’ anywhere near Plant 44.

It was a tense half-hour, with whispers in the periphery, but Carlos was grateful for the fact that the disparate sounds did not pull together into anything solid. Chris did not take his eyes off Claire the entire time, as though she would pop out of existence if he did. Jill had stared off into space, stoic and professional to the untrained eye, but he saw the way the hands resting on her knees sat, how the fingers twisted around one another, rubbing knuckles and pulling at the leather of her gloves.

When they left, the damp sheen of the decontaminating mist still glistening in their hair, he had nudged her and asked if she was ok. She had replied with a nod and insisted in that stubborn tone of hers that she was.

After that, she had joined Claire and the doc as they led the way and Chris fell back – a trade he saw no upside to at all. At first, Carlos kept his distance, moved to the left when his steps drifted too close to falling in time with his own, but then he realised that was kind of the point.

“Thank you,” Chris said, simply, plainly. He offered nothing else, didn’t even look at him when he spoke.

“For what?”

Chris seemed annoyed at the request for elaboration.

“For what you did. For saving her.”

“Didn’t do it for you.”

“Well, I’m saying thank you all the same,” Chris growled. “Even if it was a fucking stupid thing to do.”

“You telling me you weren’t about to do it yourself?”

Silence.

Jill had not scolded him. She wouldn’t. Because he had scolded her for the exact same thing back in Raccoon City, and every time since that she had come close to chastising him in the same way he had just looked at her with raised eyebrows and she had grumbled and in the end said nothing. It was coming, perhaps, but not any time soon.

Chris said no more, and they soon approached the access door to the service corridor. Dr Macintosh unlocked it, his hand pausing as it rested on the handle, and then he turned to address them.

“Look, this plant is no laughing matter,” he said. “The spores are already all around Sector 4, so you take your mask off at any time and it’s nighty-night, but the thing itself…it’s aggressive. You so much as look at it wrong and it will tear you apart. Not for sustenance, just because it can. Watch your step, and don’t do anything stupid.”

A light flickered to life in the back of Carlos’s mind, illuminated a recent memory, and he reached into a pouch on the front of his vest. There, the detonator remained, safe and secure. He took it into one hand, flipped the guard up and down a couple times, and tried to recall exactly how many charges they had managed to set before they’d lost the rest.

“Good idea,” Jill said. Then, she turned to the doctor. “We set explosives in the greenhouse – if it gives us any trouble we can blow them. Wont’ be enough to kill it but it should buy us enough time to get clear.”

Macintosh’s eyes widened.

“You went _in there_?” He sounded both terrified and impressed in the same breath. “Well, you certainly have bigger balls than anyone here. Just…don’t do anything unless you have to. You could weaken the entire structure and that’s a death sentence for all of us. Or worse…you could just piss it off. Same outcome.”

For a man who worried a lot, he certainly did a good job of faking confidence. But though he opened the door, he then stood back to allow his ‘rescuers’ to take point.

Carlos, closest to him, did just that, and stepped into the service corridor. It was no narrower than the hallways they had been trekking through, but the ceiling skirted a little closer to his head and whoever had constructed the place had evidently saved the fancy tiles and chrome paneling for elsewhere in the facility. Thick pipes jutted from the right hand wall, electrical cables wound tightly behind them, disappearing through holes in the ceiling. Around all of this grew a network of vines, poked through holes in the left-hand wall. They were thin and wiry, grew mostly up the wall and along the ceiling, and here they seemed largely untouched by the white mycelial network.

It put Carlos in mind of the camps he had slept in during hot summer nights when necessity called, of cabins that the jungle had already begun to reclaim. He’d never liked them much, preferred to only pay them fleeting visits and spend his free time in the comfort of whatever apartment he’d been able to afford that month. The humidity was no stranger to him but that wasn’t to say that he liked it. Here, the chill hit in much the same way. Had their masks not captured their breath he was certain they would have been able to see it in puffs of white before them.

“The fungus doesn’t propagate well in heat,” Dr. Macintosh explained. “We tried to crank up the heat in the greenhouse, but the plant grew through the heating units and…” He made a spit-filled fizzling sound. “Makes you wonder how intelligent it really is.”

“Watch your step,” Carlos urged the team. He held his pistol in one hand and the detonator in the other, eyeing every vine as they passed.

The route was largely clear, if not harrowing. The pipes creaked and groaned, and something beyond the wall to their left seemed to answer their call. It must have been at least an hour since they’d been forced to flee the greenhouse, but the plant seemed to have yet to calm.

Roughly half-way down the corridor a thicker vine grew, almost to his knees. With great care, he managed to grip onto a seemingly sturdy pipe above and lifted himself over before turning to help the others do the same. Jill needed no assistance, neither did Claire, and they traversed it easier than he did. The pipe sagged a little under Chris’s weight, weakened by those that went before him, and the doctor needed both other men to help him across.

The wall here was in a greater state of decay. Where the vine burst through they could see all the way into the greenhouse, where the plant swayed and shifted itself over now-exposed sections of wall. Carlos wondered if the charges were still where they had placed them – he had seen Claire fix hers to the platform not long before it had fallen. Perhaps it would work in their favour, blow out a chunk of the roots?

Their radios buzzed suddenly, spewing static and a familiar voice.

“-can you hear me? Over.”

“Leon, is that you?” Chris asked. They all stopped where they were, looked at him expectantly.

“Oh, thank God! What the hell happened? We thought we’d lost you.”

Chris winced.

“You almost did. Long story, we’ll explain later but Miguel’s gone, so are Charlie. The rest of us are still in one piece and we found a survivor.”

“Shit.”

“Where are you now?” asked Jill. “Please tell me you found something we could use.”

Dr. Macintosh folded his arms across his chest, looked from Jill to Chris then at Claire, then Carlos. He seemed nervous, tapped his foot against the floor.

“Dimitri managed to access the mainframe – no data, but we found the self-destruct. Barry and I went to look for you – we’re approaching the mess hall.”

“No!” shouted Chris and Jill in unison. The doctor jumped and even Claire looked around, eyeing the large vine warily.

“Don’t go in there,” Jill insisted. “It’s a death trap. Chris, send him our co-ordinates. There should be a door leading to an access corridor not far from your position, we’ll be there in a few minutes. Meet us there and we can get the hell out of this place, blow it all to hell.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was another beep and the line went dead.

It was over. Almost. Carlos felt a sense of relief, the fear of failure ebbing away. With Macintosh’s evidence they at least had something, and now they could ensure that damn fungus died here.

That same relief passed through them all, and for a moment they breathed, relaxed, let down their guard. A moment was all it took.

Claire yelped in surprise as Macintosh grabbed her, pulling her back away from the group as he jammed the barrel of his gun into her temple.

“You’re not Umbrella!” he snarled accusingly. “Who the hell are you and why are you here?”

Chris’s weapon was already trained on him, as was Carlos’s but both men noticed that Jill’s remained safely holstered.

“Take it easy,” she said. “Nobody has to get hurt here.”

Diplomatic. Of course. Carlos tended to forget that she had been a cop before all this.

“You’re going to kill me as soon as we’re out of here,” the doctor accused. “You’re here to steal the research, right?”

“Yes, we are here for the research,” agreed Jill. Chris bristled beside her.

“Let her go, maybe we’ll take you with us,” he threatened. Jill waved a hand at him.

“Emmett, was it? We aren’t going to kill you. We came here to find evidence against your employer. Look around, you know what they’re doing. Come with us, help us, and we can arrange protection. Enough people have died here. Umbrella are going down, their stocks are plummeting – do you want to be remembered as someone who played a part in their atrocities, or someone who did something to put things right?”

Claire was calm, Carlos realised. She didn’t squirm, didn’t fight, just stood there with her hands raised, staring blankly ahead. Her right hand, he noticed, rose higher, next to her ear, behind the hand that held the gun.

Suddenly, she lashed out, pressed her hand against Macintosh’s wrist. The gun fired, a hole blasted in the floor inches from Claire’s boot. There was a moment of struggle, the gun clattered across the floor, and Claire was on the ground beside it, the tables now turned.

“First thing you taught me, right Chris?” she asked with a smirk. “Disarming an opponent. Nice try, doc, but you’ll have to do better than that.”

The doctor’s face paled and he took another step back.

“Hey!” he pleaded. “I’m sorry! Look, I… You need me. I have the evidence, you’ve got nothing without me!”

Claire raised her left hand, something held between her index and middle finger.

“You mean this?” she asked, brandishing a grey floppy disk. A hand dove into the loose pocket of his lab coat and his shoulders visibly sank. Claire she nodded to Jill and reached across to pick up the fallen weapon. “She taught me that one. Fortunately, we’re not monsters. So, you’re going to walk with us, we’re all going to get out of here, then we’re going to have a chat. But you don’t get either of these back.”

Macintosh took another step back. Something crunched underfoot, set his balance off, and he stumbled, flailing his arms out as he fell, crashing into the vine behind him with enough force to nudge it back an inch.

He looked back at them, and time stood still. Carlos reached out for Jill, grabbed the back of her vest and pulled her backwards. Chris did the same to Claire, and the tip of the vine missed them both by mere centimetres as it curled like a cracking whip, wrapping itself around Macintosh’s torso. There was no scream – there wasn’t time for that. A bone-scraping crunch sounded as the doctor’s body bent in half, the space within the vine constricting to almost nothing. It retracted, pulling a section of wall away with it, but he was already dead.

In the space previously concealed, they saw that familiar flurry of movement in the greenhouse. Three, four, _five_ large vines flailed about, and green buds opened to display opulent white flowers with yellow anthers, lily-like in their shape. Under any other circumstances they might have been considered beautiful.

“Carlos!” Jill cried, but he was already there. He flipped the guard on the detonator and pressed his thumb hard against the switch.

There was a moment of silence, stretched out long enough to seed doubt. Then, an eruption of heat and noise that shook the floor and sent what remained of the wall hurtling towards them. Carlos was lifted clean off his feet, slammed into the back wall as pain erupted along his cheekbone and down the arm he had raised to protect his head. The hiss of steam escaping nearby pipes accompanied the ringing in his ears, and when all settled and was calm, the quiet flap of plant life simmered gently in the background.

“Claire!” called Chris somewhere in the distance.

Carlos watched the dust swirl and settle. Somehow, he had landed in a seated position, propped upright against the back wall. A searing pain burned through his left side – something had pierced through the opening in his vest, he could feel it jutting against his lower rib, prodding his upper arm. It didn’t feel deep, and he had survived far worse.

He heard the others move, saw Claire lean over and peer into the greenhouse. From where he sat, he could see sections of the steel support structure – no more vines, no more movement. One of the larger tendrils flailed about, severed approximately halfway down. It tried to reach for them, but the explosives had done their job.

A scent of sweetness reached him where he sat, like lavenders and jasmine, floral like a tea he remembered drinking once but couldn’t quite place where. It wasn’t the stale, fetid stench of the mold, but something about it hit the same.

He tried to move but his legs felt weak, and when he made to raise his left arm pain shot down to his wrist and up to his elbow – broken. He raised his right, felt along the smooth plastic of his mask, traced a sharp edge, and felt the roughness of his beard and the soft flesh of his lips through a crack that was more like a fissure.

“Carlos?”

He wanted to laugh, but the effort seemed far past him. After everything, after all that, this was how it ended?

“Carlos! No, no, no!”

Jill fell to his side. As she reached for him, her fingers sliding oh so gently up his neck, forks of purple and pink spread across the paling skin around his eyes and beneath her hand. Something beneath that skin burned, he could feel it. With every breath everything hurt a little less. It was nice, in a way.

He pulled his mask aside, let the broken thing clatter to the floor. If he was going out, he was going out and he wanted…

“Carlos, stay with me, _please_.”

Jill’s hands were on his cheeks now, her touch soft and warm. He’d missed it so much, but he’d never really noticed just _how_ much until now. She’d never liked hand-holding in public, but she was as tactile as he was in private, running her hands up his arm, across his back, or a little lower if nobody was watching. Little things, you know? Small comforts that made being with her feel more like home than any physical place ever had. It wasn’t Umbrella he had followed to Europe, he realised. It was her. Even the chance to work closely with her was enough. She had that energy, that _vibrance_ and it was intoxicating.

There were so few things Carlos was sure of. His life had been a series of impulsive decisions and he’d bounced from one to the next, hoping wherever it landed him was a little better than what he was leaving behind. In the end, he was sure of one thing: that her face was the last thing he wanted to see. Raised by a Catholic mother and an agnostic father, he’d never really formed beliefs of his own, didn’t know what lay ahead. It could very well be nothing and if it was, maybe he could carry that last feeling of happiness over the line with him and it would echo out through eternity.

“Please,” Jill begged. She was crying. That wouldn’t do. He tried to raise a hand, knowing those tears would be out of reach, but nothing moved. So, he leaned into her touch, kissed the palm of her hand.

“Hey, Supercop,” he whispered. Every word took incredible effort. The blue of her eyes brightened, so too did the scenery.

Then, the sky opened above him, and the light consumed all.


	11. The Somnambulist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All she saw were the walls of her apartment back in Raccoon City, the empty desks of her friends and their names and faces plastered over the broadsheets she saw every day on her subway ride to work.
> 
> All the progress she had made since then, and here it lay, shattered around her.

The hospital had a private ward set aside and waiting for them. ‘Under refurbishment’, as far as most of the staff knew, punishable by disciplinary action should anyone ignore the many ‘do not enter’ signs that had been taped to the doors.

Jill couldn’t recall most of the journey there, but she remembered being ushered through a side door, forced to strip in a shower room by a nurse who spoke very little English, and hosed down with scalding water. She had been handed a single bottle of luminous pink wash and the instructions to scrub every visible inch of herself with it, which she had done. Only then was she handed a gown and led through to a room where masked staff inspected her wounds – all superficial – and then led to a four-bed room and told that she’d need to stay there for the next 24 hours under observation.

Rebecca was already waiting there when she entered, as was Denise, and Claire wasn’t far behind her.

No words were spoken, not even when the tears finally broke free and she ended up sobbing into Rebecca’s shoulder.

Sleep came easily but the ride was rough. She dreamt of fractal landscapes, of a spectrum of colours, and of creatures clawing through the walls. She dreamt of Carlos, always out of reach, fading away behind a mist that grew thicker the harder she screamed.

Despite all this, she slept more than her fair share, waking shortly after noon by a smiling nurse who handed her a lunch that she wolfed down fast enough that it left the urge to vomit in its wake.

They were questioned shortly after, and Carla had comforted her in her motherly way over video link before assuring her that the evidence they had found would be of great use to their case. Leon echoed this when their paths crossed in the hallway, though he spoke in a more sombre tone.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“How the fuck do you think?” she snapped. He was only asking, only had her best interests in mind, but she was too raw to apologise.

“They say Carlos-“

“I heard everything they ‘say’. Doesn’t change a damn thing, does it?”

Leon left it at that, with a pat on the shoulder and an awkward smile. He didn’t know how to handle her like that, and she didn’t blame him. All she saw were the walls of her apartment back in Raccoon City, the empty desks of her friends and their names and faces plastered over the broadsheets she saw every day on her subway ride to work.

All the progress she had made since then, and here it lay, shattered around her.

She lay in bed later that afternoon when Chris stopped by but pretended to be sleeping. Part of her was too scared to drift off, recalling the hellish dreamscape that had awaited her last time. But there, in the eye of her mind, was the possibility of seeing _him_ , of hearing his voice, feeling his touch. It was a trade she was almost unsure she could make.

Almost.

* * *

_“Carlos!”_

_“Jill, we have to go.”_

_“No, he’s not- He’s still breathing!”_

_“Jill, c’mon.”_

_“No! Let me go, Chris! We can’t just leave him here. No!”_

Carlos woke to the cold touch of steel. He was warm, but barely. He was…wearing pyjamas? No, sweatpants. Really? And he was shirtless and barefoot, with his left arm held in a cast from the elbow down, and bandages wound around his torso and over his shoulder.

He tried to move but everything hurt. His arm, his ribs…

As he considered his injuries, pain flared at both sites and he pushed himself upright, wrists jarring uncomfortably in restraints that held him to a long, metal table.

Now he was awake.

Where the hell was he?

The room was small and bright, large white tiles covering three of the walls and what he assumed was a two-way mirror taking up the entirety of the fourth – the one before him. There was a single door in and out and a light above it shone a vibrant red that he could see reflected in the table an on the curved edges of his bindings.

“Hey!” he called out. “Is anybody there?”

The mirrored wall before him shifted, revealing a row of consoles and two individuals he held no memory of. One wore a white lab coat over a black shirt and grey trousers, the other a formal grey pinstriped suit. Their faces lay in shadow, as did much of the room behind the glass.

“Welcome back, Mr. Oliveira,” the Suit greeted, his voice hard and tinny over the intercom. “We were worried you weren’t going to join us.”

“Where the hell am I?” Carlos snarled. “Who are you? What the hell happened?”

“Your location is of no concern,” the Suit said. “Neither is my name. All you need to know is that you are in our custody and will remain so for as long as this takes. As for what happened, I was hoping you could enlighten us there.”

Carlos struggled to pull memories from the thick fog that had taken up residence inside his skull. They were assaulting a facility, that was correct. There was a plant, and then…

“The plant,” he muttered. “How the hell am I still alive? I breathed that shit in.”

Behind the glass, he saw the Suit sigh impatiently.

“You were knocked unconscious,” he said. “Your friends left you behind.”

That wasn’t right. He wasn’t and they would never-

“We helped you recover,” the Suit corrected. “After your friends left you to die.”

There was something in the way he spoke that set something wrong in a dark corner of Carlos’s brain.

“Might want to get your story straight before you speak,” Carlos goaded. “Which one is it?”

Pain erupted from where his wrists lay against the table, rattled through his bones as the sudden buzz of electricity filled the room. He gritted his teeth, braced himself, then…it was gone.

It was a funny sort of pain, he realised. Muted, like what you would remember a sensation to feel like, close but not quite hitting the mark. His nerves felt cushioned, and it didn’t sit right with him. Had the plant’s toxins dulled his senses? Was something else in his system?

“Mr Oliveira,” the Suit spoke. “I don’t have a great deal of time, so I will be straight with you. I want to know where the former S.T.A.R.S. member are hiding out, I want to know where this ‘anti-Umbrella’ group you are working for is located, and I want you to give me names of their supporters. If you can do that you may walk out of here.”

“Fuck you,” he spat. The pain may not have been potent, but it had exhausted him all the same.

It flared again, and this time he cried out, caught himself, then choked it down into laughter.

“¡Joder si!” he laughed, his brain snapping back into Spanish. It had…been a while since that happened. “Una más, por favor.”

He was no stranger to pain. This wasn’t the first time he had been tortured and he hadn’t expected the last time to truly be the last, either. It was the risk that came with the work he took on. Goading was a habit, born out of humour and the hope that distracting the enemy, throwing them off guard, would work in his favour. He didn’t know how that could possibly work here but fuck it, it seemed like the best option open to him right now.

“Give me the location of the former S.T.A.R.S. team and the anti-Umbrella organisation you work for.”

“Not gonna happen,” he said. “So you can…you can zap me all you want. I ain’t giving them up.”

Behind the glass, the Suit sighed, then looked up, met his eyes.

“Your friends abandoned you,” he said. “Left you to die. No les debes nada.”

Those words…they struck a part of him long since buried, one that stoked a very primal kind of fire within him. He was…strapped to a chair, but not this one. Bleeding, but not bandaged. Captive, but hopeful. He wasn’t here, but somewhere in his homeland, neck deep in shit he never should have gotten involved in.

Was this a message? Did they know? If they knew who he was, then… His family…

“Jill Valentine,” the Suit said. Her name burned in Carlos’s ears. How dare he say it. How dare he curl it around his tongue so confidently. “Seems you two were pretty close. She still upped and left. Claire Redfield, walked away. Chris Redfield…seems leaving you was his idea. You see, I think he knew you were still alive. I think he left you deliberately. One less problem to take care of. How about you give me his location? I could even cut you a deal – we could let the others go. What do you say? ¿Ojo por ojo?”

The weight of his request pressed down on Carlos’s shoulders. He owed Chris nothing. Not a damn thing. Fucker would have put a bullet in his head himself given half a chance.

Didn’t change a damn thing.

“No sabes qué es la lealtad, _cabrón_ ,” he muttered, half from memory. Then, he looked up, looked the suit dead in the eye and repeated himself: “You have no idea what loyalty is, _fucker_.”

* * *

Chris had visited Jill three times but had yet to say a word to her. First, she was pretending to be asleep, then she just happened to be on her way to the bathroom, and the third time she had told him point blank to go away.

“Don’t stress about it,” Rebecca told him. “She’s…raw…right now. We all are. We lost five good people tonight.”

She said this with a grimness that caused affection to swell within Chris’s gut. Everyone else had been congratulating one another, high-fiving and celebrating. The data they had secured would, Leon assured, perhaps not be enough to dissolve Umbrella but it was enough to bring their license in Europe into question and that was the first step to ceasing their activities on this side of the Atlantic. Carla had even said that it brought their group one step closer to registration as an official organisation, meaning maybe next time they’d actually get paid for risking their lives.

But at what cost had that come?

“Has Carla spoken to the families yet?” he asked.

Rebecca shook her head.

“Not yet. I don’t think she knows what to say. How do you explain something like that?”

No bodies, no evidence. Nothing left. Just like their friends in the Arklay mountains.

Chris didn’t think he would ever get used to this.

“How are you holding up?” Rebecca asked him.

He tried to shrug but couldn’t quite manage it. Truth was that he just felt empty. Claire had clung to him and pushed him away in equal measure. She was suffering but she wouldn’t admit to it. He wanted to hold her and tell her everything would be alright, adamant that he was right this time. But he couldn’t even find the strength to reassure himself, how the hell was he meant to help her?

She and Carlos had grown close. It was a truth he was reluctant to accept at first, but now that the man’s deeds were laid out flat, like an epitaph etched into very fabric of this dark new world, he saw the little things he had missed. The way that Claire had laughed at his jokes, the way she had always seemed more cheerful after their Spanish lessons. The way Jill would lean her head on his shoulder as the group watched a movie, and the way Carlos would pretend not to notice but his arm would pull her tighter and she would settle into him and it was an uncertain gamble who would fall asleep first but in the end Jill would always be smiling. A real smile, too, like the ones she used to wear before Arklay.

Chris knew he had been stupid, had fixated on his own paranoia and clung to it with a firm tenaciousness the way he often did with these things.

And then there was himself. He’d be okay, he always was. Same old mantra. He believed in it a little less these days.

“You think it’s going to be this hard every time?” he asked her.

Rebecca kept her eyes fixed on his, swallowed.

“Yes,” she said. “Because the day is starts getting easy is the day we need to stop.”

Chris smiled. Now those were pearls of wisdom he had not expected to hear from her.

“So long as we stick together, we’ll get through it,” he said, unsure if it was a question. “Always have.”

At this, Rebecca broke eye contact. Her fingers played with the hem of her T-shirt – a secret she toyed with, unable to hide from him but not offering freely.

“About that…” she said. Chris looked at her, said nothing. She sighed. “I never told anyone, but after I left Raccoon City last year, I…sat my MCATS. I hadn’t planned to, not for another year or so but after everything that happened I thought what the hell. Needed something to focus on, you know? Well, I passed. And…I found out last week that I’ve been accepted onto a PhD course.”

Excitement shot through him, quelled only by the dampening realisation of what this implied.

“That’s…Rebecca, that’s great!”

A frown furrowed her brow.

“I…was only half-serious in my application, I didn’t expect to get anywhere, especially being so young, but…the offer came from _Harvard_. I can’t turn that down. I…I think I can really make a difference, Chris. I think this is how _I_ make a difference. Not with guns, but with knowledge.”

There was a river of excitement flowing through her words, banked by restraint that only respect could engineer. She felt guilty, he realised. She felt that she shouldn’t be excited, shouldn’t celebrate her achievements, not because she felt she didn’t deserve them, but because of the tragedy that surrounded them.

So, he rose to his feet, walked to where she sat on the edge of Leon’s empty bed, and wrapped his arms around her. She froze, then the air left her lungs and she held him back, perhaps not as tightly but equally as meaningfully.

“I am so proud of you,” he told her. She needed to know. She deserved it. She deserved all of this.

But beneath the happiness, an empty chasm yawned. Their numbers were falling. Stronger together? Perhaps. Truth was, he didn’t know how to move forward without them.

* * *

Carlos was exhausted. How long had he been here? They’d not brought him food or water, not even released him to a more comfortable cell or even just to piss. They’d just barked the same question at him, over and over again, like a damn recorded message. He told them to fuck off in plain English, in Spanish, even in French (he thanked Jill for that one) but they’d asked, shocked, asked and shocked again. Would his heart give out eventually? Would that free him from this endless cycle? He didn’t know and he found that he was caring less and less as the day dragged on.

_“No le debes nada.”_

The words floated back to him again and again and he considered them, ran them through his mind in both Spanish and English, trying to make sense of the familiarity and what that could possibly mean. It felt like a truth on the tip of his tongue, the crossword answer that you knew, you just couldn’t pull letters together to form a word.

They belonged to a time in his recent past, almost a year ago to be precise. One of the cartels had paid them a pretty penny to deliver several heavy boxes to a contact near the Venezuelan border. As far as these runs went, it was a pretty simple one – they rarely found much trouble down that end of the country and the pay was more than worth any other risk the job attracted. Carlos didn’t like those assignments much, not after one in particular had gone spectacularly sideways, but he always gritted his teeth and thought of the money. Often, they were the difference between eating for the next month or hoping something better came along. Their route brought them close to a small village, one they had visited many times before, populated by people sympathetic to their cause. They would never fly the colours, would never pick up guns and fight themselves, but they believed in a better future and were willing to do what they could to support those trying to bring it about. It was a friendly place, consisting mostly of houses, with one restaurant that doubled as a bar and tripled as a small inn for weary travellers. Carlos liked it very much there, and they had stayed for food before continuing on their way, promising to return for longer on the way back.

On the way back, however, they had been attacked. Paramilitaries, he assumed. Though it couldn’t be confirmed, it matched their MO. One of his men had been killed and he and another had been tortured. They’d wanted to know where they were travelling back to, where their camp was. Smoking out the rats, as they’d called it.

Carlos pulled against his restraints. Did his captors know what had happened that day? Of course they did. Umbrella had been following him for weeks before they’d recruited him. Knowing them, they’d stood by and done nothing, waiting to see exactly what move he would make.

Had that been the deciding factor? Was that why they had already drawn up a contract with his name on it when they had found him in Bogota weeks later? He’d always thought it was the final firefight that had whetted the pen, that his survival alone had sealed the deal.

“Hey!” he shouted. He could see himself in the two-way mirror, looking more of a mess than he had in some time. “You done with me now? Can I go?”

There was a buzz, and he relaxed his muscles, waited for the pain to hit again. It didn’t. Instead, the restraints holding his wrists to the table snapped open. Immediately, he pulled them back, lest the locks snap shut again. The cast on his arm had cracked where the steel had pressed into it, spread in forks like lightning. Or veins…

The off-white of the plaster reflected, just for a moment, a sliver of pink light. His arm didn’t hurt. Even his ribs felt no worse than normal, and not a single speck of blood had leaked through the bandage.

Was he really injured?

_A searing pain burned through his left side – something had pierced through the opening in his vest, he could feel it jutting against his lower rib, prodding his upper arm._

As if on cue, warm pain spread from his bottom rib up to his armpit. ‘Yes, I’m here,’ it said, dull though it was.

Another, louder, buzz filled the room and the light above the door flashed green. The thick metal slab retracted into one of the walls and a light from the hallway beyond shone through.

Carlos didn’t waste a second. He was on his feet and in the hallway before someone could realise their mistake.

Red emergency lights flickered overhead, casting their hue on the white tiles. He knew these corridors, all white and silver.

“No, no,” he mumbled.

It couldn’t be. They had found the self-destruct, they were supposed to blow this place. Had they failed? Had it not worked? Had they been killed before they could manage it?

The tiles were cold against his bare feet, and against the tips of the fingers he trailed along the wall. The air was warm, and devoid of that awful stench. He wondered for a moment if he was immune now, if he would be able to walk out of here or if he would be knocked out again, and wind up back in that chair fending off the same questions until he was begging someone to just end his boredom, unsure of just how sarcastic that request would be.

He passed labs, empty and devoid of all furnishings. The hallways forked and curved and wound back on themselves. Every now and then, a hiss of static could be heard, and voices would spit out of nowhere.

_“Un poq…taquicar…nada…ave.”_

_“…nivel de oxíg…ueno…sanguí…able.”_

He did not recognise these voices. They spoke Spanish but not the kind he was used to, and he was sure he had never heard them before.

“Get out of my head,” he grumbled.

The more he willed them away, the quieter they became, until nothing but a deafening silence hung around him.

Through this silence, a sound grew. A low tone, like breath held for a moment and then exhaled. A shadow extended at the end of the corridor, blotting out all light. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck stood to attention, his skin now rough with goosebumps. Something stood ahead, just past where the red light illuminated, he could _feel_ it.

The hum ceased, choked into silence.

A scream – no, a _wail_ – tore through the quiet. Something was baying for blood, calling for quarry. It moved in the shadows, and they crept forward, rolling down a black carpet at its feet.

Seized by fear, Carlos ran.

* * *

The nurse came for Jill shortly after dinner and found her awake, resting her chin on her knees and staring at the far wall. She thought maybe it was Chris again and wondered if she finally had the energy to talk to him, or anyone for that matter. When she noticed the scrubs, she snapped her head up so fast her short hair whipped around her face.

The nurse said nothing, just smiled and nodded, and Jill jumped off the bed.

She followed the nurse down the hallway, to the room at the end of the corridor, the one staff had been filing in and out of all day. As they approached she heard the beep of machines from within and found that the last few steps were particularly difficult, like wading through treacle.

In the doorway, the weight around her ankles pulled her to a stop, forced her to pause for a moment and take in what awaited her.

A single bed furnished the room, flanked by a number of machines, some of which ran tubes up to the bed, others stood a silent vigil, waiting for a call to arms. They whirred and flashed and formed grey shadows in the late afternoon sun. In the middle of all this lay Carlos, paler than she knew him but with more colour to him than when he'd been wheeled away on arrival. He looked almost peaceful, hair splayed in a dark halo on the pillow, save for the tubes that connected him to the illuminated machines that surrounded him.

“How is he?” she asked, turning to the nurse that remained with her. She smiled, and gestured forward, indicating that it was alright for her to get closer.

“Too soon to tell,” the nurse said in a lilting accent as they both approached the bed. “He will not wake, but everything is within normal levels. Blood test came back negative for virus. Now, it seems he is just asleep.” Perhaps sensing her worry, she reached out to place a hand on Jill’s shoulder. “We read the notes. All of them. Maybe the other victims simply did not have right care. We will monitor him all day and night. Now, we just wait for him to wake up.”

The nurse left, and Jill pulled a chair over to the side of the bed, careful not to catch any wires or move anything important. They had assured her that while this was technically an intensive care room now, she could stay as long as she wanted so long as she didn’t get in their way.

In her bed, on the ward, she had run through so many possibilities. She thought perhaps by the time they allowed her in, it would be to say her goodbyes. Now, seeing the colour in his cheeks, she felt at least some comfort, and when she reached out to touch his hand and felt that it was warm, she finally felt able to breathe.

“Fuck,” she gasped, the word almost choking her. She wouldn’t cry, not here, not like this. She’d cried enough on her own. It wouldn’t help, wouldn’t magically bring him back. “Carlos, I’m so sorry. I…God, you have to wake up. We can’t leave things like they were.”

‘You can’t die thinking I don’t care,’ she whispered into the chaos of her mind.

He said nothing.

_“Carlos!”_

_His eyes drifted closed, head lolled against the hand he had kissed. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t-_

_A shoulder bumped hers, hands that didn’t belong to her reached for his neck, fingers pressed beneath his chin, and her own hands fell away. Everything moved too slowly. She was underwater, gallons’ worth of pressure crushing down on her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t quite remember how to. A head covered in brown hair moved closer to Carlos, turning its ear to his mouth. It turned, looked at her, and the whining in her ears, that high-pitched tinnitus, whirred to a dizzying pitch._

_“Jill!”_

_She shook her head. Chris. He was looking at her. His hands were on Carlos’s shoulders._

_“He’s still breathing,” Chris said. “Pulse is faint but it’s still there. C’mon, help me lift him.”_

_Footsteps thundered down the hallway, further voices joined them._

_“What happened?”_

_“We heard…oh no.”_

_“Leon! He…His mask broke, I-“_

_“Barry, give me a hand, this fucker’s heavy. C’mon.”_

_“Careful!” Jill called, finding a ledge, planting her fingers upon it, and heaving just enough that her head broke the surface. No time to grieve, not now. “His arm is broken, and if you hit that shard, you could drive it right into his lung.”_

They said the wound wasn’t fatal. Breathing would hurt for a while if he woke up, but they’d put his arm in a sling if that happened to take the pressure off the muscles on that side. _When_. _When_ that happened, she reminded herself.

How was she meant to be hopeful? Plant 44’s spores had a 100% mortality rate. Sure, surviving against all odds was kind of their thing but even so, this was…something else.

She ran a thumb across his wrist bone and down over his thumb. Nothing. Beneath lids fringed with enviably long lashes, his eyes moved. She wondered what he was dreaming, then, recalling the notes they had unearthed, found that the thought pulled her deeper into the black chasm that lay open beneath her feet. There wasn’t a damn thing she wouldn’t have given to swap places with him. He didn’t deserve any of this.

Someone entered the room, pausing first at the door, and then moving slowly inside when she did not react. She didn’t care who it was or what they wanted. Her attention was solely on the man before her.

She raised a hand, brought it to his hair, ran her fingers through it and brushed a thumb against his forehead.

“He’s looking better,” said Chris.

Jill smiled. There was a cut on his cheek where the mask had split, superficial at best. On the other side of his face, bruises still bloomed around the eye; a reminder of troubles that seemed so long ago.

“I can leave if you want me to.”

“No,” she said. Reluctant though she was to admit it, she found being alone incredibly painful right now. “Stay…please.”

She felt him move away and the scrape of chair legs against tile was heard a moment later. He stunk of cigarette smoke and it somehow seemed more pungent against the sterile scent they had all carried since their medicinal scrub earlier that day.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “And none of this was your fault.”

“I don’t think this was my fault. None of us could have stopped this. I just wish…”

A pressure built in her sinuses, the tobacco scent of Chris fading beneath it. How could she explain this to him? How could he understand? She’d fucked up. Royally. She’d pushed Carlos away when she should have pulled him close, hurt him despite her best efforts, all in the name of saving him. And none of it had worked in the end. He was still dying, and she was filled with pain and regret over the time she had wasted and the things she had brought him to believe. Things he could take to his grave now. Not even half-truths; fabrications, lies. What, of everything she had done, had made this moment any better?

Chris placed a hand on her back and that was all it took for the pressure to burst and warm tears to leak down her face. He pulled her close, the legs of his chair squealing in protest as they dragged against the tile once again. The tobacco-infused scent of him enveloped her, but she found a comfort in it, and she leaned into him as he wrapped both of his arms around her and kissed the top of her head.

“I fucked up,” she said. “Chris, I fucked up and I don’t know how to make it right.”

He said nothing, just held her, urged her to join him in silence, and she did. Her sobs died beneath the sounds of the machinery, the warmth of Carlos’s hand, still in hers, grounding her as much as Chris’s embrace. When she had cried her last, when she devolved into dry-sobbing into Chris’s wet sleeve, he loosened his hold just a little, gave her room to pull away when she was ready.

“You really care about him,” he said.

Jill let out a sniffling sob of a laugh. She sat up, swiped at her damp nose with the bony part of her wrist.

“I love him,” she said. “I love him, and I never had the balls to tell him.”

It was cathartic, letting the words loose like that. In saying them, she realised that they had rang true for some time, she had just been too caught up in her own self-pity to acknowledge that. That’s what she should have said that day, not ‘goodbye’. ‘I love you, Carlos, and I don’t know what the hell that means but let’s figure it out together’. See? So easy.

“I know,” Chris said, raising a hand to brush damp hair out of her face. “And I think he knows, too. You’re not that good at hiding things.”

* * *

It followed him at a steady pace, never quickening. No matter where he turned, no matter how far ahead he ran, it remained the same distance behind him, screaming its funereal song.

Funereal.

Yeah, he knew what it was now. He’d heard her before. She’d sung the name of many of his friends, had hummed a tune over Jill’s bed in the hospital that night. It had been a warning then, a prelude to a tragedy he had averted. Or so he had thought. Perhaps she had been singing his own elegy all along.

“Fuck that,” he hissed. He didn’t have time for a show, not tonight.

He looked back once more, and the shadows had given birth to a form, hazy though it was. A lady in white, faceless and ethereal. The shadows moved around her, swallowed her, revealed her for another moment then closed again.

There had been a time where he had feared her more than anything. It was a stupid superstition but to such a young mind it had grown deep roots.

Carlos stopped dead in his tracks.

The stories… His grandmother used to tell them, and his mother recounted them from time to time. That’s all they were. Stories. Meant to tame unruly children and frighten superstitious adults. They weren’t real, never had been.

The scream choked into silence and when he turned to the shadows they were just shadows, creeping along the walls and floor like vines.

_Vines._

He looked down at his hands. The cast was gone. The pain was gone.

_Lavender…and jasmine. Vines, like whips. A voice, soft and afraid; the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard._

“I’m dreaming,” he said. “This isn’t real.”

The plant…it was a dream root, they said. Put you to sleep, killed you… No, gave you nightmares…nightmares that killed you. Or were the nightmares just another part of a slow, inevitable death?

The shadows crept onward. He had the feeling that if they reached him it would be bad. Don’t ask him how. Just a feeling.

There was a door in front of him, covered in bright yellow biohazard tape. Had it been there a moment ago? He opened it, and it led into blackness. He looked back at the shadows, watched them eat the light, swallow the scenery. They weren’t shadows, they were…nothing. Just a swirling mass of nothingness, consuming everything it touched.

‘They say don’t step into the light,’ he thought, considering the options before him. ‘This ain’t light.’

The nothingness ebbed closer, and the scream echoed within.

Carlos looked deep into the blackness beyond the doorframe and stepped across the threshold.


	12. Sharp Edges

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We’re a team, remember? Partners. Now and forever."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter is a fair bit longer than usual, but it didn't feel right splitting it down or cutting anything out so you get an extra long chapter this time :)
> 
> A bit of a content warning for this chapter - if content warnings aren't something you feel you need please skip the rest of this note as it may be a little spoilery. Everything fits within the rating and archive warnings but I don't ever want anyone to feel uncomfortable so this is just an extra layer of insulation! This chapter contains an implication of violence involving a child. Nothing graphic, specific or detailed but if that does make you uncomfortable please skip the third section after the breaks (Carlos's second section) and if you want to know what you missed, leave a comment and let me know and I can summarise it for you :)

“Oye!”

“Oye, Rolo!”

“¿Está dormido o muerto?”

“No voy a mover el cuerpo.”

“Oye! Carlos!”

Carlos snapped awake to a finger poked roughly into his ribs and a bemused face hovering above his.

“Ey, he’s alive. Yo, David, put the shovel away, we good.”

“Oscar?” Carlos grumbled.

The remnants of sleep clung to him, singing him a tale of darkness and terror, but only for a moment. Fragments of images and memories swirled in his mind, consumed by a fog that chilled as much as it obscured.

“Good dream?” Oscar teased.

Carlos grunted.

“Bad dream,” he said. “Something about, zombies, and...”

A girl, pale and wounded. He clung to her like he knew her, troubled by a fear he could not quite understand. She was pretty. No, she was beautiful. She had…blue eyes. Yes, the brightest blue eyes.

“That look doesn’t say bad dream to me,” Oscar teased.

For a moment, Carlos wondered which images represented the dream – the girl or Oscar. Both felt equally odd and unsettling. But the dream had placed him in a city, then in…a lab? The city reminded him of his Stateside home, of the loud chaos that was New York City. That was very far from where he was now, and why would he ever go back?

Carlos pushed Oscar and he fell away laughing. Letting the dream fall from memory, he pulled himself out of the truck, aching in places a twenty-one-year-old shouldn’t ache, and looked out into a scene that brought a familiar comfort.

“Well, I dunno about you,” said Oscar. “But I am finding the strongest, coldest liquid they have here and pouring it down my throat.”

Carlos chuckled.

“Just water for me – you idiots get to sit back and relax now; I ain’t so lucky.”

They had been here many times before, often for business, sometimes for pleasure. A small village; the kind nobody ever left, not necessarily out of lack of opportunity, but rather love for their home and loyalty to its people. Generations of farmers and craftsmen had plied their trade here and would until the day they died.

Wooden buildings surrounded the central square and market stalls were already set up for the day. David had wandered over to one, peered down at the layers of fruit upon wooden planks, clutching his rifle still. A little further down the way, Cristian was conversing with an old man, smiling and laughing. Nobody batted an eyelid at the men in their olive fatigues and heavy boots. If anything, their presence was welcomed, like a visit from a close relative.

“Big Diego!”

Carlos turned, missed the blur barreling towards him, and almost fell to the ground when something small attached itself to his legs.

“You’re here! Mama said…mama said you were coming!”

Shaking off the momentary shock, Carlos smiled and reached down to ruffle a mop of dark hair as unruly as his own. A small child detached themselves long enough for him to lower himself to his knees and match a wide, happy grin with one of his own.

“Hey, Little Diego,” he said. “Look at you! Not so little anymore, huh?”

The child grinned, all chubby cheeks and missing teeth. He was five- wait no, _six_ now. Carlos distinctly remembered him having more teeth when they had last met. Less hair too.

“Are you staying?” Diego asked.

There was such hope in his voice that it brightened a darkness that had taken up residence in Carlos’s chest as of late. The kid had a habit of doing that, and this was coming from a guy who’d never much had an opinion on kids.

Big Diego, he called him. Because he was Little Diego and kids latched on to the silliest things.

“Not this time, big guy,” Carlos apologised. “I’ll be back through in a few days though, might consider it then.”

“Oh, oh…mama said to bring you!” At this, a small hand grabbed his and yanked him forward with surprising strength.

“Hey, Big Diego, we got an hour!” Oscar called. He wore a knowing smirk and Carlos scowled at it, shook his head, and then picked up the child running beside him and carried him kicking and giggling beneath his arm to the inn behind the market.

“Yeah, yeah, kick and scream all you want, I got you now.”

A bell rang somewhere nearby as he elbowed open the door. As soon as they were across the threshold he lowered Diego to the floor and the child ran off down a long corridor behind a small desk and out of sight.

To his right, the clink of glasses drifted through an open door. Carlos turned and saw a large room filled with empty tables before a bar devoid of patrons, a single older gentleman rearranging the stock behind the bar. A large eatery for such a small place, but it did the best damn sancocho he’d ever tasted, his mother’s included – his mouth watered just thinking of it. A chef like that would make a killing in the city but, as with everyone in this place, they were comfortable here, didn’t want for anything. He envied that.

“What did I tell you about bringing guns into my home?”

Carlos was sure he felt his balls retract into his body, but he could not fight the smile that followed.

“Just the small ones?” he replied.

He turned to find her standing by reception, her arms folded across her chest in a manner not unlike that with which his own mother had greeted him far too often. Trouble was, she couldn’t maintain it, and a smile pulled at her own cheeks before she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck in a way that was perhaps a little too loving for greeting an acquaintance.

“Welcome back,” she said.

Carlos shouldered his rifle further onto his back and wrapped his arms around her in return, placing them too low, then too high, then somewhere in the middle. She pulled away with an amused smirk and he was sure he felt a blush colour his cheeks.

Marina was beautiful by anyone’s standards, with soft brown eyes and thick waves of dark hair. She had stolen the hearts of many of his men on their travels, but she’d never given time to anyone but him. They had met not long after he had left the army, when he was nineteen and full of hope, and she was run down and exhausted, carrying plates and drinks to their group with as much skill as she fended off their advances. Carlos had sat with his head down for much of the night, but a nineteen-year-old left to their own devices in a new place that didn’t care how strong the alcohol they served him was or how much of it he drank, had far more energy that the older men he followed and so he’d sat in a lonely corner of the bar long after they had retreated to bed.

That was when he met Diego. A tiny four-year-old clutching a raggedy blanket, padding into the bar to look for his mother. Their men passed through often enough that the locals knew them, but here was a new face and Diego wanted to know more. When Marina had found them soon after, Carlos was telling him some stupid story his father had told him when he was younger, and Diego was giggling on his knee.

The child had fallen asleep in his mother’s arms at that same table as they had chatted. She was older than him, mid-twenties, and widowed. Her husband was with FARC, she had explained; one of the few men to leave the village and join the cause directly rather than be content in offering support. It was just who he was, she had said, with a weary kind of sadness. One day, he hadn’t come home, and suddenly she was alone with a child and an inn to run, and…sorry, he really didn’t want to hear all this. But he did. And now, he would take any assignment that directed his path past that village, even the ones of dubious and downright questionable morality, to hear more.

It bothered him more these days, the kind of man he was becoming. Here he was, playing with a kid and making eyes at the mother when they had enough cocaine to start a war boxed up in the back of their truck. The trip wouldn’t kill anyone, neither would they, but he had spent the latter part of his teenage years in New York, had seen what the end result of that transaction would be, how many lives it would destroy. But that was another country’s problem, another people’s, and he had sworn to fight for the freedom of his own at all costs.

“You just passing through this time?” Marina asked. Carlos placed his rifle on the reception desk and stepped away from it, edging back into her space.

“’Fraid so. But, depending how long this takes us we may have a few days on the other end, if you’ve got room?”

She laughed, and it sounded like angels singing.

“You know this place,” she said. “There are always free beds. For you, especially.”

Carlos raised an eyebrow and she smirked back before waltzing away behind the reception desk with light steps. This was what they did – flirted and laughed and teased, said their goodbyes and the whole cycle began again.

“Well, you know I’ve been eager to stay,” he said. “You know I’m still holding out on you letting me buy you that drink, too.”

Marina, who had been looking for something beneath the desk, rose once again from behind it, her expression fallen just a little.

“Diego-“ She caught herself, looked around, then when she realised that they were alone: “ _Carlos_ , you know I only have eyes for one man.”

As she said this, the man in question thudded back down the hallway, clutching a folded piece of paper in his hands.

“What you got there?” Carlos asked, crouching to greet him. An exchange was made, the crumpled, crayon-covered paper shoved into Carlos’s hands by a pair much, much smaller.

It was a card, he realised. A stick figure waved from the front, a soccer ball at its feet and a cape at its back.

 _Feliz cumpleaños, Gran Diego!_ read the lettering on the front.

Carlos laughed and ruffled the little guy’s hair.

“Can’t keep any secrets from you, huh? Thank you. You’re a real artist in the making.”

“Mama said you’re twenty one! That’s old.”

Marina’s laughter drifted over the desk.

“Yeah? Well, you’re six – you’ll be twenty-one tomorrow, then who’ll be old?”

Diego pulled a disgusted face, a stubborn refusal to believe that anything existed beyond childhood. It was a denial Carlos remembered all too well, and he knew just how lucky this kid was to still be able to cling onto that. His own innocence had been lost with his father, and that path had led directly to where he was today. Maybe Diego had been too young to fully understand his own loss, but that’s exactly why Marina had erected a fence between herself and a man she obviously cared for. She wasn’t protecting her own feelings – she was protecting the kid. Her strength, that infallible armour she wore, was the kind only mothers knew.

Something heavy thudded on the desk above him and he pushed himself up. A small wooden frame sat upon it, four bottles of a familiar beer sitting within.

“Marina…”

“Happy belated birthday,” she said, and leaned across to place a chaste kiss on his cheek. His skin burned, and something in his gut tightened. “I know how much you like it, so I got my brother to set a few bottles aside on the last batch.”

This beer was available only in that small village – it was more a hobby for her brother than a business venture, but it was Carlos’s favourite brew by far. He wasn’t sure how much of the reason for that was how much it reminded him of this place.

“Steady now,” Carlos said, though he knew his gratitude was written quite plainly in his expression. “People might start talking.”

She said nothing, and for a moment he thought he saw a hint of sadness behind her smile.

“Oh! I almost forgot!” he exclaimed. He shoved a hand into one pocket, then another, then remembered that he had stashed his target in one of his pouches. “I have something for you, little guy.”

Diego bounced on his heels in anticipation and squealed when Carlos, down on one knee again, held out the gift. It was a small wooden charm, carved in the shape of a bear, on the end of a long leather cord.

“We passed through a village a couple weeks back and there was this real talented lady there. I saw this and thought you’d like it.”

“A bear! It’s a bear, mama! Look, a bear!”

Marina had joined them and laughed at her son’s energy as she took the pendant, doubled the cord and slipped it over his neck.

“What do you say?”

“It’s a bear!” he shouted at Carlos, and all three of them laughed.

“You’re welcome, kid.”

They ate together in the bar next door with the rest of his guys and a few familiar faces. They had to leave pesos on the table, the owner was so adamant that they didn’t pay.

Marina left him with a kiss on the cheek, the same she did with the others, but his lingered just long enough that the others ribbed him mercilessly when they climbed into their truck.

As Carlos pulled the vehicle away from the waving crowd, smiling at the child attempting to run after them until he was held back by his mother, the radio hissed away from its choppy music, whining so loudly he had to turn the volume almost all the way down.

Oscar, in the passenger seat, didn’t even flinch, and the conversation of the two men in the back trickled on without interruption. It set the hairs on his arm upright and he shivered despite the heat.

 _“…sorry,”_ hissed a distant male voice amidst the static. It spoke in English, bearing an accent his brain placed somewhere in New York state. Against the Spanish conversations around him it felt jarring in an almost preternatural way.

_“…understand that Umbrella…”_

There it was again. That chill. A familiarity he couldn’t quite place. Umbrella… He knew that name. From a dream, perhaps? Wait, no…they were a pharmaceutical company. Didn’t have much of a presence in Colombia but their shit was all over the shelves in New York.

_A red and white logo, text curved around the circular shape, on an embroidered patch on the sleeve. It beat the Army regalia he was used to, that was for sure. And it was different for all of them – some wore vests with simple lettering, others displayed a larger logo, crossed with swords and a shield in the centre. He’d been given the option of an olive shirt with one of these black vests, but he’d opted for the standard black and the olive plate carrier._

A wind pulled the trees outside, the conversation within the truck dying.

_“….know you didn’t do that for me either but, Jill-“_

Jill…

_Blue eyes, brown hair, pale skin, a smile that would melt even the coldest heart. Had melted his…_

The voice grew stronger, chased away the hiss and buzz of the radio.

_“…get through this, I’ll man up, I’ll apologise-“_

_Pain, blood, a different kind of pain. She was crying, he wanted to. Wasn’t this how it always happened? A strong woman would make eyes at him, he’d go nose over tail and his heart would end up broken when the updraft didn’t catch him. You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but with her it was different…_

_Anger, hatred, cold grey eyes…_

_Mercenary. Lost soldier. Terrorist._

Carlos slammed his hand against the radio, shut it off completely.

“Hey!” cried Oscar. “Little less of the homicidal rage if you’re driving, please.”

The wind dissipated, the conversation drifted back into his ears, and he pressed his foot to the pedal, biting back an inexplicable wave of anger, and an even deeper rivulet of hurt.

* * *

They were discharged the next morning with clean bloodwork and little more than bumps and bruises. The headache that had been haunting Chris finally seemed to be on its way too, and at long last he felt able to think straight again.

He’d tried to go home, he really had, but all that awaited him was a sofa and television that failed to distract him. Claire had retreated to her room immediately, Leon had been swept away with a promise to return later, and the others… They sat in a silence so haunting he wasn’t sure leaving the hospital had been the win they had all expected it to be.

They had waited long into the night for the winds to change, for something to give and the noise of the world to creep back in, but when they had stolen what little sleep they could, it was to wake to the same silence that had bade them good night.

Unable to bear it any longer, Chris persuaded Barry to drive him back to the hospital after breakfast and they sat in silence for most of the journey, the droning tone of a Spanish newscaster humming over the car stereo.

“I’ll wait,” said Barry at long last, when the engine died and the angular concrete building loomed ahead. Neither man had acknowledged or expressed reasoning for the trip, but somehow both were still acutely aware of what had drawn Chris on that journey.

He responded with a stiff nod and set out across the parking lot and into the building. The hallways here were unfamiliar and he had to ask for directions twice, but he soon passed a large blue sign stretched out across the wall reading ‘ _Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos’_ and approached the first nurse’s station he saw.

A young nurse in a grey uniform tapped away at a computer and looked up with a start when he caught her eye.

“Hola,” she greeted uncertainly. “¿Cómo puedo ayudar?”

Chris blinked at her, wishing not for the first time since his arrival that he had paid more attention in high school.

“Uh…ver…amigo,” he tried. “Oliveira?”

The nurse’s eyes widened in realisation.

“Ah!” she said. “The…American. Si, uh…this way…please.”

They passed rooms both big and small, some filled with staff, others empty. It was quieter here, the sound of machinery louder than that of human life. He didn’t like it. The whole idea of sitting around waiting to die; it shook him something bad, always had. The nurse led him to a room near the end and held open the door.

The room beyond was small but bright, with a long window along the back wall illuminating the single bed within. The décor was minimal in a room designed purely with functionality in mind, but it was cosy in its own way, with wooden paneling at the head of the bed breaking up the otherwise drab off-white walls. The machinery that had been present in their quarantine wing was here too, some of it still in a state of dormancy. Carlos looked no better, but no worse, so he supposed that was something. More than that, against the white sheets, surrounded by tubes and wires and covered in cuts and bruises, he looked nothing like the interloper that had once lurked in Chris’s mind. He just looked like someone far too young to be skirting so close to the final curtain.

In a large chair to the right of the bed snoozed Jill, legs curled beneath her. She looked like shit, to put it bluntly: dark circles beneath her eyes, hair unkempt and greasy. For a moment, Chris contemplated leaving her be, turning on his heel and making his apologies to their friend outside. But he’d seen this before, and it frightened him more than anything else in this place did.

With soft steps, he approached her, knelt down to her level, and gently nudged her awake. It took a few attempts for her eyes to open, like a kitten blinking against the light for the first time. She pawed at her face, rubbed those eyes until they were red and she was seeing stars, then looked at him.

“Chris.”

Before a reply could form on his tongue, she looked to the bed urgently, relaxing only when she saw that the scene before her was exactly as it had always been.

“How are you doing?” It was a hollow question, but someone had to express the concern they all felt and direct was the only route he knew.

Though she had settled back into the chair, her eyes had not yet left the figure on the bed.

“His oxygen levels fell overnight,” she said, dryly. “Or something like that. I don’t know what that means but I don’t think it’s good. They’ve tried a few things to bring him round, but nothing is working. They…just have to keep his body going however long it needs to wake itself up. If it can even do that…they don’t know. They’re treating it like a coma.”

“Jill,” he said softly. “I asked how _you_ were.”

She blinked, tore her eyes away from the man on the bed.

“Oh, I…”

She rubbed her cheek, eyes drawn once again to the bed, and Chris sighed.

He saw again how she had stared blankly at him in that corridor then snapped back, like a rubber band. He’d seen it back in July, in the aftermath of the mansion incident, had spent the following weeks watching that tension weaken until she’d crumpled beneath her trauma and they’d both had to admit that they needed help. He saw her slipping back to that place and he wanted to grip her tightly enough that if there was no stopping her, then she took him with her. Anything so that she didn’t have to face it alone.

“You need to take a break,” he told her.

“I can’t. I have to be here if- _when_ he wakes up.” She sounded panicked, half-alert, and her words began to run together. “You saw the files, you read the notes, he can’t be alone when he comes out of that, he can’t, and I promised, Chris, I _promised_ we’d always face this stuff together and I can’t- I just can’t…”

He saw her fighting the tears, but they came anyway, and she attempted to push them away with the heel of her palm.

“You know what I think?” Chris said. “I think you’ve barely slept in two days, I don’t think you’ve eaten anything since yesterday, and I _know_ you haven’t showered since that hose-down. Barry is waiting in the parking lot outside – go home, have a shower, get some sleep in a real bed, and-“

“I can’t,” she insisted. “I can’t leave him alone.”

“He won’t be alone. I will stay here until you get back, however long that is. If he does wake up while you’re gone, I’ll tell him how bad you smelled, and he’ll thank me for it.”

Any other time, he would have got a laugh, maybe even a playful shove. But the fact that her usual stoicism had shattered so spectacularly after barely a prod showed just how fragile she was. He doubted she had the energy within her to laugh.

Jill looked to Carlos again, then sighed with a gentle shake of her head.

“A couple hours,” she said. “That’s it, then…”

“Then Barry will drive you right back here and we’ll tag out. We’re a team, remember? Partners. Now and forever.”

“Thank you.”

He offered to accompany her downstairs but she refused. Before she departed, pulling her cardigan tightly around her shoulders, she leaned down and pressed a kiss to Carlos’s forehead, stroked his hair for a long second. Then, she was gone.

Chris removed the magazine he had shoved in his back pocket and took position in the chair Jill had vacated. This wasn’t so bad, he thought. A bit of peace and quiet might be what he needed right now.

He looked over to the bed, and a chill ran through him. The subtle rise and fall of Carlos’s chest was the only sign that there was still life in him. He couldn’t look at his face, not with that damn bruise still colouring his skin with shades of purple and yellow. He could see scars, tiny ones along his arms, unlikely to take up permanent residence – memories of Raccoon City, etched into his skin. Jill still bore a few of her own, and those he and Claire had collected on their December adventure had barely settled from pink to white. Tribal markings. A shade away from war paint.

Shame thawed his veins, and he wasn’t sure which he preferred: the fear, or the realisation that he’d been a colossal asshole to someone who in the end really hadn’t deserved it.

“For what it’s worth,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

It didn’t make him feel any better, but there was a certain catharsis in letting the emotion free. So comforting was that which it left in its wake, Chris found that he couldn’t put a stopper in it.

“You gotta understand that Umbrella…” No, he wouldn’t make excuses. “Look, I don’t handle shit like this well, I'll admit that. I do what I think is best to protect the ones I love, and that ain’t always kind on them, or the people around them. I fuck up. I never even thanked you for saving her life. I know you didn’t do that for me either but, Jill, she’s…she’s special, you know that. She really cares about you, and you don’t know how rare it is for her to admit that. So…if you get through this, I’ll man up, I’ll apologise to your face, and I’ll twist her arm ‘til she admits that she’s head over heels in love with you and you two can…I don’t know. You can have however happy an ending as we can get in all this. Just…don’t put her through this. Please.”

The machines continued to whir, the line on the ECG monitor maintained its steady dips and falls. Chris sighed, and unfurled his magazine.

“Good chat.”

* * *

Everything hurt. Two of his fingernails were missing, ripped clean from their beds. He could taste his own blood, checked with his tongue to see which teeth – none, thankfully – had worked their way loose. His left eye was puffy and sore, but he could still see well enough to drive and neither Oscar nor Cristian were in any fit shape to. Every so often Carlos would nudge the former as his head lolled against the window. Every time he did, his friend would hiss in pain, complain a little, and then snap himself awake. He needed medical care, urgently. They all did.

Together, they’d managed to lift David’s body into the back, but in this heat the smell poisoned the air quickly and their stomachs rolled and twisted under its fetid presence.

Their captive in the back, curled against their friend’s corpse, was rousing slowly, groaning as the truck rocked back and forth. Carlos was driving too fast, risked an accident on these roads, but he couldn’t slow down. The wooden pendant burned a hole in his pocket and his vision was a dark vignette, hollowed down to a point. He saw only the destination, not the trees that whipped past, nor the dirt road their tires carved tracks through.

The radio hissed and spat, whining to a pitch that made his entire body ache, as though the resonance itself was working its way into his bones. He felt warmth spill against his arm, just in the crook of his left elbow.

_“He asked permission the first time he kissed me, you know. Caught me so off-guard I didn’t even know what to say…”_

His foot eased off the pedal.

That voice…

_She looked at him like she wanted him, and that was enough. But as the words tumbled out, he cringed at them. He didn’t want to just go for it, you know? Didn’t want to grab her and smack one right on her lips and have her slap him for being so bold. But he had never been so sure of needing anything as much as he needed her. So, he asked..._

“Jill?”

 _“Being with him felt…safe._ I _felt safe. I’d forgotten what that felt like… Suddenly, I wanted something beyond revenge, and I didn’t give that half the thought I should have.”_

Yes. Safe. That’s what she felt like. Home. Like the nightmares didn’t matter, because when he’d wake she’d be there and that’s all he wanted.

Awake.

He was dreaming. Yes. The interrogation room. The plant. The spores. The sleep.

But this wasn’t a dream… This was real, these people were real, this pain…

He pressed his foot to the pedal and the engine roared, tires kicked up a tsunami of dirt. The radio fizzled into silence once again, but the realisation and the clarity it had brought remained.

Yeah, he was dreaming, but hadn’t he been here before? He had lived in this dream for months after the fact, repeating each detail over and over in horrifying detail. Each time, he had woken, wondering why those images haunted him so if he couldn’t do a damn thing to change them.

This wasn't just a nightmare. It was the worst day of his life. What sick entity would force him to relive this? Why was he here?

Muscle memory kicked in and Oscar yelled as he pushed the engine as hard as it would go down the final stretch of road. The village loomed ahead, a right turn taking them-

Red.

Red everywhere.

 _Just a dream_.

The stench of death hung in the air, but it would be months still before he knew to label it as such.

_No, you’ve already been there. This is all in the past. Just a dream._

To this day, Carlos wasn’t sure who had cried out first – himself or Oscar. Their captive guest was awake now, spewing Spanish curses at them. Cristian kicked him for good measure, then dragged him outside as Carlos stumbled out of the truck and into a scene of carnage.

He’d seen some shit, both before and after that day. Liked to think he had a strong stomach.

That strong stomach emptied itself onto the dirt.

“ _Dios mio_ ,” breathed Oscar. That was right. There was no English in this memory. That was his brain, wired as it was now to shunt his mother tongue to ‘second language’. “What did they do?”

The market was in shambles, stalls in pieces, produce rotting in the mud. A single row of bodies awaited them, others dragged and dumped nearby, like a piece of art abandoned before the vision was realised. Some were missing limbs, others riddled with bullet holes. There were faces he recognised, torn to shreds, and others he didn’t but mourned no less.

Above it all hung silence. The village had never been silent, not in the years he had been visiting.

The fear that had gripped him back in the cabin thrummed into a numbness that was all-consuming. It brought his eyes to the inn, and his legs to power him frenetically towards it.

What he saw within, he wouldn’t describe. Not to Oscar when he asked, not to their camp leader, not even to himself after that day. He could still taste the blood on the air when he thought of it, still felt the way his soul left his body. He’d not cried, not there, not then. The rage was too potent, too all-consuming to allow any other emotion space to propagate.

A caustic feeling of loss coursed through him. He remembered it well, from the day his mother and his grandmother had been asked to identify a bullet-ridden body found in another market across the country. The day his father hadn’t returned home. Perhaps the white lady would have wailed again had his blood not pounded so viciously in his ears.

When he limped outside, the wooden bear pendant no longer on his person, he saw his comrades by the truck. Their guest, the one whose neck Carlos had plucked that pendant from back in the cabin, was on his knees between them, laughing at their curses.

The ugly one, Carlos had called him, back when his actions amused him, back when he thought he could beat a confession out of someone as loyal as Carlos Oliveira. Yeah, he was ugly. Everything from his face to his voice, to the damn soil he knelt in.

The whooshing in his ears deafened him still. Oscar was shouting something at him now, but he didn’t hear it. When no reply was offered, Oscar’s face froze, what little colour remained draining from it.

The first thing he heard was the crack of a gunshot ringing out into the late afternoon, and the dull thud of the ugly one’s body hitting the floor. He hadn’t even realised the gun was in his hand until he felt the trigger bite into his finger.

Cristian stared down at the body, Oscar too.

“Fucker deserved it,” the latter said. Approval? That wasn’t what Carlos was looking for.

He looked at the man before him, dead by his hand, and felt nothing. Not even anger. Just the empty abyss of nothingness.

Yes, he had thought about this day a lot, wondered exactly what about it he would change if he could. He had tried to save them, so many times. Every single one, he had failed. There had been no hope of controlling that fate. It was always coming, if not then, then years down the line. Maybe when Diego was older and ran the inn himself, or when he chose his father’s path and Carlos, if he was still around, held a different kind of regret. Maybe when Carlos had hung up his gun and promised Marina that he could be what she wanted, when this village was his home too. Maybe when she was married to someone else, someone she deserved, and he was warm and merry in a bar somewhere, or cold in the ground. The one thing that day that had been under his control was that moment right there, and the empty revenge he had taken.

Would he have changed it? He wondered this as grief brought him to his knees and he screamed it out, the way he had that day, the way he always did.

Truth was, he wasn’t any closer to knowing.

* * *

Chris didn’t leave when Jill returned. He vacated his chair, the large blue comfortable one, but he’d pulled the small stiff brown one beside it as she began her new vigil and remained even when the conversation dried up.

They’d talked of old friends and new, of times far back in the years they had known one another, of the rivalry that had blossomed into a friendship. She’d told him, at long last, but in a moment that felt so underwhelming, that she had been lost without him in the days after he had left, when Irons tightened the noose and forced her out of the PD entirely and into a cell that looked a lot like what she had once called home.

Then, when the conversation turned to the final days of Raccoon City, he said something that set both her head and her heart spinning.

“Tell me about him.”

She saw where his gaze fell, but still questioned who he referred to.

“You’ve always made it clear I refused to see the real him,” he said, stiffly. “So…tell me about him. Tell me about the Carlos Oliveira you know.”

Jill placed a hand on Carlos’s arm, just above where the hair on his forearm peeked out beneath the soft bandage at the edge of the plaster. His skin was cooler now, his pallor a little paler but the doctors assured her that his condition remained stable.

“You want the NC-17 version?” she joked.

Chris met her with a raised eyebrow.

“Alright,” she sighed. And she told him. Every moment, every thought, every feeling. She’d spared him the more graphic details, but always looped back to how Carlos made her feel: safe, at home, like there was nothing in this world she couldn’t take on. Not a manufactured emotion like the ones the pills had encouraged, and not one borne from adrenaline. The Real Deal.

He wanted to apologise to her, in the end, but she pre-empted that.

“It means a lot that you’re here,” she said. “Thank you.”

His hand caught hers and he squeezed tightly.

A beep sounded behind her.

Chris looked up, and her heart shuddered, like it had forgotten how to beat.

Another beep. She turned this time, saw the lines on the ECG machine shorten, saw a light which had previously held a steady white flash yellow. She felt a tremor against the hand that remained on Carlos’s arm, felt the muscles contract and relax.

“Carlos!” she shouted, as his whole body was wracked with convulsions. Barely a few seconds had passed before the doors burst open and medical staff filed in, but those seconds were stretched out across an aeon.

Chris grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back as the staff shouted at one another, pulled back the bedsheets and reached for equipment wheeled in on a small trolley.

“Come on,” Chris urged. “Let’s get out of their way.”

She couldn’t have fought if she wanted to, and let him pull her out of the room as her heart fell through her stomach.

* * *

The wail stretched on too long to be his own. It was pulled to a peak then dropped, seemed to reverberate through the ground.

Carlos’s head snapped up. The soil in the centre of the marketplace, moistened by blood, began to bubble and shift, and darkness spilled through, like a tear in the Earth. He watched, frozen in place, paralysed as a long, spindly arm extended out of the shadows, then another. Elongated palms pressed against the soft, wet, dirt and pulled a shapeless mass free of the blackness.

_Nothingness. Not shadows, not darkness – Nothing._

Pain erupted at his neck as teeth sank into the flesh, tearing it wetly from bone. The spray of his own blood splashed upon his cheek as their ugly friend let out a guttural wailing moan. Carlos elbowed it back, popped it in the head once, twice, three times for good measure.

Thick red blood ran over his shoulder and onto a trembling hand. The bodies around him began to move, undulating like a living mass, some rising to their feet, some falling into the spreading Nothing.

The creature that had crawled out of the abyss wore a cloak of purest black, and it hissed and rattled, distorting the air around it as it clawed its way towards him. He couldn’t get a good look at it, when he tried…

His hand trembled so violently the gun fell from his fingers. More teeth sank into his leg, tearing a chunk of his calf away. He couldn’t even pull himself to his feet now, couldn’t breathe.

Where were Cristian and Oscar?

The Nothing dripped from the creature’s body, fell like tar to the zombies it crawled over, eyes that were bare pinpricks of light locked on to him, and it fed a rising wave of paralysing terror.

He tried to scream, but nothing came out. Tried to find his gun but it was lost amidst the bodies that crawled over him, jaws gnashing.

All he had was a grenade, one that slipped in his blood-soaked hands as he freed it from his belt. Another chunk of flesh was torn from his left arm as he yanked it out of the jaws of the living dead.

He was dead anyway; he couldn’t even pull air into his lungs anymore. But he was fucked if he wasn’t taking some of them with him.

Maybe…maybe this would be it. Maybe this was how he woke up?

_“Carlos!”_

“Jill…”

The creature shrieked, ceased its advance for just a moment. The head of a zombie moments away from tearing his nose from his face exploded outward, and then another followed, the dull _pop pop pop_ of a distant weapon sounding over the din.

It was enough for him to force his legs to move and push himself out of the crush of bodies. Those legs were very unsteady, his right calf leaking blood as he moved. The voice…it came from inside the inn.

Cristian and Oscar were nowhere to be seen, nothing left of them to rescue.

_Move!_

Towards the inn? No. Not there, not again. He didn’t need to see that, couldn’t see it. Don't make him go in there.

_So you’d rather die? MOVE!_

With a growl, he limped towards the door, barreled inside as the creature howled and the earth trembled beneath it.

There was a door he had never noticed before, to the left of reception. Its position wouldn’t make sense; it would lead back outside.

Something cold pressed down his throat, tripped his gag reflex. A horrible, scratching sensation followed, and he clawed at his skin. Then…air. It felt cold and fresh, but it forced its way into his lungs and he could _breathe_.

That’s when he saw the scratches on the door. Curved lines, over and over again, forming a familiar shape. A biohazard symbol.

He reached for the handle, pulled it open and saw a familiar blackness. For a moment, he considered his next move. How would he know where he would end up? Would he wake up, or would he be thrown into another nightmare? Did this cycle have an end?

He closed his eyes, thought of Jill, thought of all the things he wanted to say to her, whether or not she wanted to hear them. He thought of his mother, and the promises he had made her, thought of Tyrell, of Murphy, and of Mikhail…and the vengeance he had promised them.

His work was not done.

So, he leapt into the darkness once again.

* * *

Twenty minutes. That’s how long they were in there. It felt like longer. Jill clung to Chris for all of it, silent against the wall outside. They couldn’t understand the shouts of the medical staff, but they understood the moans of terror – the first sounds he had made since admission.

She couldn’t recall ever being so scared, not as that monstrosity in labs below the Spencer Estate bore down on her and Chris, not as the Nemesis hounded her through the streets of Raccoon City. Not even as she had stared down the barrel of Nicholai’s gun, so close to freedom but closer still to her own end.

Eventually, the machinery settled into a familiar symphony and the staff filed out one by one. When the final one, a tall male doctor in a white lab coat, emerged, he noticed them standing there and offered a weak smile.

“He is stable,” he explained.

“What happened?” asked Chris, when Jill’s own words failed her.

“His oxygen saturation levels dropped sharply – he stopped breathing for a short while. We have him on a ventilator now, but we will need to monitor this more closely going forward. Does Mr Oliveira have a history of seizures?”

Chris looked to Jill, but she found herself scraping the corners of her memory for an answer she knew wouldn’t be there.

“I…don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t know, I’ve only known him a few months. He was armed forces until a couple years ago and I don’t…I don’t think they’d let him in if he had?”

Would they? She knew so little about the Colombian Army and its regulations, less even about Umbrella’s recruiting practices, and she wondered now if medical history was something they ought to have shared with one another. She didn’t even know how to contact his mother to ask, or how she’d go about obtaining official medical records – if he had any.

She felt her chest tighten as the doctor smiled at her in a manner intended to be reassuring.

“Is he going to be okay?” It was a question she had asked a thousand times, out loud and to herself.

“I’m afraid we can’t say. His case is…unique. It’s up to him to pull through this, all we can do right now is support him where we can.”

Jill needed a moment to catch her breath when he left, and Chris waited patiently, still half-holding her. He didn’t push, didn’t suggest anything, just waited until she was ready.

When they stepped back into the room, she swallowed dryly.

A new machine hissed and clicked by the bed, this one connected to a tube that now ran between Carlos’s lips, attached to a band that wound around his head and sat above his upper lip.

She didn’t know if she wanted to run to him or run the other way. Blood, she could deal with. Viscera? No problem. But this…

A hand in the small of her back urged her forward and she moved, not to the chair but to the left of the bed, reaching for the hand that rested upon the blue sheets. Still warm. Still did not respond to her touch.

“Hey,” she said. “You made me a promise, remember? Together. That’s how we do this. Whatever this is, you can fight it.”

His eyelids fluttered and for a moment hope seized her. No. Just REM. She sighed and returned to that blue chair, kept her hands to herself this time, and waited, with Chris still at her side.


	13. Unheavenly Creatures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This war took good people; wasn’t that what wars did? There wasn’t always a rhyme or a reason. It didn’t always make sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another long one (the longest one yet!). The first scene was cut from the previous chapter but apparently the result of that was just making this one longer haha. There have also been bits and pieces with Leon and Claire (Claire especially) that I have ended up cutting for pacing so I really hope this one makes up for that :).
> 
> We are very close to the end now, and it's crazy to think that we have got this far from what was initially an idea half this length so thank you all so much for sticking by it!

**February 3 rd, 1999.**

Claire had left her Game Boy in her old room. She’d not used it in a while, hadn’t really had the chance, but she was running out of distractions and it was a tried and tested one.

It was a simple mission – in and out, no casualties. But that was the problem. The casualty. The one this room now belonged to.

She wondered if the room would smell like Carlos, then realised that she had no idea what he smelled like, really, had never been that close to him. That was something for Jill to know. For Claire, the impressions that lingered were his kindness and his patience, his laughter and easy-going nature. Their absence was as jarring a reminder as any scent that may or may not have lingered.

The bed was half-made, clothing scattered across it. They had all been in a rush to leave but he was the only one who hadn’t returned to tidy their mess. She considered for a moment making the bed ready for when he returned, but then her brain had a moment of pessimistic fear and she thought it best to leave it as it was, to preserve that unfinished task and not risk tempting fate.

It could have been the bed that tweaked the wrong nerve. It could have been the book, unfinished and open on the bedside table. Whatever it was, it sent her back to her own room to cast the Game Boy aside and stare into space, fielding off a creeping wave of despair.

This war took good people; wasn’t that what wars did? There wasn’t always a rhyme or a reason. It didn’t always make sense. And this sure as hell didn’t. Was this how it would be from here on out? Would every victory see them burying someone else before their time? Was Carlos just another light snuffed out between the fingers that pulled the strings?

Like Steve…

A familiar and unwelcome emotion overcame her – she couldn’t tell you what it was, couldn’t attribute it to anything known to her teenage mind. It was a prickling unpleasantness, a hollow sort of chill. Steve’s voice had echoed in those hallways, like it did in her dreams. Asking, _begging_ her to save him. He was terrified, and so was she. What could she do? What could any of them do?

There was a knock at the door, and she barked a welcome out of habit. Leon appeared in the doorway but didn’t step inside at first, just looked for her, then at her. When she said nothing, he made the move and allowed the door to close softly behind him.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I called your name. You looked… Well, you looked distracted.”

She hummed and lowered herself to the edge of the bed. There were things she didn’t feel comfortable discussing, even with Chris, and this was definitely one of them. But this was Leon. He wasn’t Chris, wasn’t…

Did she really know who he was? Their paths had diverged, pushed them apart. They’d stuck together when it mattered but then the government had whisked him away, and-

No, that’s not how it had went. The government had whisked him away, yes, Sherry too, but she was the one that had left. There had been coffees when he could spare the time, dinners when he couldn’t but did anyway. Because they were the only people in the whole damn world who truly understood what the other had been through and even if they never really brought it up there was a certain comfort in just existing in the same place as someone like that. But when it came down to it, she was the one that had got on the plane and almost never came back.

“That wasn’t a yes,” Leon said, laughing in that soft, awkward way he had.

“Wasn’t a no either,” she pointed out. “Okay, okay… I just…had a moment. I’m allowed those, aren’t I?”

“Only if I’m allowed to want to help.”

There was a moment when she considered asking him to leave. He cared, and that was a problem. She wanted to not care right now, wanted to forget everything, including Carlos and Steve, and him just being here made that impossible.

But she couldn’t. Because she wanted him here and though she still wasn’t sure what that meant, she was willing to entertain it for a while.

“You didn’t see the worst of it, Leon,” she said. “You didn’t draw the short straw. I don’t know what Chris and Jill went through, but I don’t think he’s with her right now purely for her sake. And me? I nearly _died_. I saw it happening, felt it. And you know what bothered me the most when I came out the other side? That someone else had almost died too, trying to save me. Is that what we do? Do we gamble our lives like this is all a fucking game?”

Leon said nothing.

“And what do we do when it’s all over, huh? What about the people left behind? What about the people who lost everything? What about the Raccoon City refugees that _still_ don’t have permanent homes? What about the vulnerable groups just waiting to be preyed on by these fuckers? Who is helping them, huh?”

The rage poured out of her, and it felt _good_. Everyone kept getting sad when what really needed to happen was for someone to get angry.

“I’ve got a feeling you already know the answer to that one,” Leon said.

It didn’t still the fire within her. If anything, it stoked it. He _understood_. Of course he did. This was Leon.

And that was it. The straw on the proverbial camel’s back.

It had been a while since she had cried. It wasn’t something she did, not anymore. She faced her demons, learned their names and sent them packing before they could get close. It didn’t feel comfortable, especially not with a witness.

But Leon didn’t judge, didn’t run like she had expected him to. He reached out and placed an arm around her, pulled her into him and said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. For not being there.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“I should have been there from the start, for you and for Sherry.”

Now, she shoved him, but it was weaker than she had intended.

“You did what was right by you,” she said. “I’m not ever going to hold that against you so don’t you dare hold it against yourself.”

She smudged her tears away with a frustrated sniffle.

Sherry was another thing, and she felt a different kind of guilt creep in. She already knew what that meant, what she had to do. But she wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet.

“Something else is bothering you,” said Leon. “I don’t have to be an ex-cop to see that. You want to talk? You want to grab a drink?”

He was persistent if anything.

“You’re really not going to stop?”

“To be honest, I’m not sure.”

They laughed together, and suddenly she was at ease.

“Jill called,” she said when the laughter died.. “Carlos stopped breathing. They had to intubate him, he’s on a ventilator now and… She said he had a seizure when she was there and Leon, she sounded _terrified_.”

Leon tried to consider Jill afraid and came up blank. It was like the Pope telling his flock to lie, cheat and fornicate their way through life. Like Chris Redfield taking it easy.

“He’s a tough guy,” he said, voice catching in his throat. “He’ll make it through.”

Claire was unconvinced.

“He’s the same age you are, Leon. He might look halfway to thirty but…he’s still young. A big part of survival when you’re young is sheer dumb luck. We’ve already had a lot of that. More than our fair share.”

Leon looked away for a beat and she saw, much to her shame, that he was just as haunted by this as everyone else. She’d not seen the two of them talk a lot, but they’d always gotten along well when they did. Two kids, forced to grow up far too fast. Carlos’s experiences may have aged him faster than Leon’s, might have forced maturity that felt almost tragic for someone his age, but there was a kinship there all the same.

“You just need to have faith,” he told her. “I know we can’t get by on that alone, but when we’ve got nothing else it’s something.”

His optimism was almost contagious. It didn’t rear its head as much these days, not when it came to himself, but he was good at doling it out for others.

“I never told you about Steve,” she said. The moment felt right, and she grabbed it before it could slip away again. “He was only seventeen, ended up on Rockfort same as I did. Didn’t ask for it, didn’t deserve it. He was a bit of an asshole, but he was a good person and…we got out together. Kept each other alive. In the end…”

She saw that hallway again, saw the glistening armour. She heard his pleas turn to screams, felt that helplessness take hold again. She saw the light leave his eyes, heard his final words.

“I couldn’t do a damn thing,” she finished. Her cheeks were moist again, and Leon’s arm was tighter around her now.

The seconds dragged on and the tears kept coming. There were two arms around her now, and her face was buried against his neck. He didn’t complain about the dampness on his skin, some of which she knew was probably a very gross helping of snot. In that moment, he didn’t feel like the rookie cop she had met in Raccoon City, didn’t feel like the friend she had walked towards that sunrise with. He felt like…

“I met someone in Raccoon City,” he said. “Never told you about her, but… She was older, maybe mid-twenties? She, uh… Helped me when I got shot.”

Claire raised her head, latched on to something that felt a little more comfortable, but his arm remained around her. She was glad for that.

“Pretty?”

“What? N-“

“Leon, you’re blushing.”

“Well, yeah, she was…attractive. She also lied to me. Used me. Gullible fucking idiot I was.” A sigh. “Some things, I think were real. Sure felt real. At least, I had hope. But you know how that goes. I failed her in the end. Didn’t matter what I did, she-”

His breath hitched in his chest, and Claire brought a hand to it, placed it over the fabric of his navy blue T-shirt. She could feel the thrum of his heartbeat beneath her fingers, and when she looked up their eyes met.

“You’ve changed,” she said.

It was more an absence of something rather than anything new, and she saw it clearly now. That wide-eyed rookie, the one eager to help and please…where was he? The man she saw before her now seemed to have aged years in the months they were apart, lost something of himself along the way. It stirred within her a profound sense of grief.

“I had to,” he said.

All this time she had thought him on some noble path, driven forward by a sense of justice she couldn’t even begin to emulate. Whether shattered or crushed, all broken things ended up the same.

One of his hands found hers, the one she held against his chest. He didn’t pull it away, simply held it in his own, let their warmth combine.

Here they were, two lonely, broken souls, yearning for something to make sense.

A kiss wasn’t the answer, but it had seemed like a good idea, for reasons that would not become clear to her for many years to come. Leon didn’t seem shocked, seemed but a breath away from the same action himself. His lips were soft she found, and they parted in faint desperation against hers. Tongues met, the hand on his chest drifted to his cheek and the one at her waist pulled her into a body that felt surprisingly hard against her soft curves.

An infernal heat raged through them both, brought clothes to the floor, hands to places they would have blushed upon considering only days ago. It was a therapy she knew well, and one he would yet become accustomed to. Gone was the shy, gentle man she knew, and something in his roughness only deepened the ache in her thighs.

She was on her back and his lips carved a path across her jaw and down her neck, his tongue moist against the nipple that he drew into his mouth. A tussle ensued and she won, flipping him onto his back, dragging her nails down his smooth chest to hook fingertips beneath his belt. They fumbled to remove it together and he was hard when she found him beneath it, vaguely impressed with what he was packing. With any other man she would have let out a soft laugh, trailed her hands across him and teased him with words.

But this wasn’t the end of a hot date, wasn’t even close to romance. This was comfort, and they both knew it.

Even so, as she gazed down at him she felt something else beneath the lust and the desperation. She saw pain that she wanted to chase away, strength that she wanted to nurture…she saw someone important to her in a way she could not even begin to fathom.

She rifled through the drawers on Jill’s side of the bed and found foil strips of pills freed from their cardboard packaging, and a single unopened box of condoms.

Leon’s grip on her hips tightened, coaxing her back, his lips smiling against her neck. She ground her hips down against him, satisfied at the moan this drew from deep in his throat.

When she grabbed his cock in one hand, and guided him into her, greedily sinking down onto his length, she found that for a brief moment in time, she remembered what happiness felt like. And that was the most precious thing in the world.

* * *

Carlos was in a familiar bar, at a table near the counter. It was a dump, a dive, whatever you wanted to call it. It was rough as hell, but the kind of place where a guy like him could grab a drink without arousing suspicion. The last time he had been here, he was on the verge of sepsis, two holes in his torso and an even bigger one in his prospects.

He knew he was dreaming this time, didn’t need an anachronistic reminder. The pain at his shoulder was enough, if the blood still trickling down his arm wasn’t. The adrenaline that had spurred him through the last door was gone, leaving only exhaustion in its wake.

How many had he been through? It felt like he’d been here months. He could remember more than he cared to, but some felt like distant nightmares, others like some part of him had been flayed to the core.

_“C’mon,” he begged. “Not like this.”_

_She was afraid. Couldn’t speak, but her fingers clawed at his chest as he held her desperately. They were free of the city, free of the nightmare. The vaccine had_ worked _, why was this happening?_

The last had felt too real, had brought him to press his gun to his temple, cradling Jill’s body in his lap. Sense had caught him at the twelfth hour, but even then, looking down at her pale, limp corpse had sent an incomparable jolt of despair right down to the parts of him that still ached for her.

He didn’t know how much longer he could do this. His mind felt fractured, his body not far behind. The wounds weren’t healing, stayed with him through door after door, horror after horror. Was there no end to it?

He didn’t know how much longer he _wanted_ to do this.

Someone took the seat opposite and he braced himself for the inevitable, knew how this dream went. He looked up. The Suit. He laughed. If this was his own mind, it wasn’t very creative. If it was some outward force, a parasite burrowed into his brain, it was downright lazy.

“Back for more?” His voice felt chalky.

“Carlos Oliveira,” the Suit said. “I won’t take up too much of your time, but I have a proposition for you…”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The words droned on; a speech he was familiar with. The guy was with Umbrella, a Pharmaceutical company operating mostly out of Europe and the United States. They were putting together a PMC in the wake of rising tensions world-wide and the predicted threat of bio-terrorism. They had been watching him for a while and could use someone with his skills, could provide him with the medical care he needed, even…

Carlos’s eyes wandered around the bar, disinterested in the sales pitch. The patrons were silent, holding drinks but not partaking in them. He recognised some of them – faces from his past. They looked at him, silent and focused. Only one did not; a lady in a white cardigan, staring resolutely in the other direction. If he hadn’t known they were all images conjured by his mind, existing only to unsettle him, he would have thought she was eavesdropping.

There was a door behind the bar, one he couldn’t recall being there when the memory had been collected. It was grey and peppered with stickers, the way blank surfaces tended to become in places like these if left too long. Biohazard symbols. A red and white pointed logo. Three yellow stars against a blue background.

He knew where it led. What he didn’t know was whether he wanted to walk through it. This nightmare didn’t seem so bad. He could stay here a while, rest, regenerate.

The Suit was still talking, and his voice felt like a nest of hornets inside his skull.

“How about fuck you, man,” he said. He just wanted to sit here and enjoy his glass of cheap-

_Blood._

He dropped the shot glass and it shattered, the red liquid within splashing over the knots of the wooden table.

The ground trembled, picture frames swayed on the walls. He looked for the Nothing, searched for the source.

The Suit stared at him with half-lidded eyes. Eyes that turned milky white. The shriek, that awful wail of a cry, reverberated throughout the bar as the patrons – all but one – threw their heads back in unison, jaws extended past what was humanly possible. The Suit stared him down, and his jaw fell too, the sound-

 _Crack_.

The Suit’s head exploded in a spray of viscera, the body slumped against the wall. The shriek choked to an end, and the patrons had turned their gaze to another figure, one with an outstretched arm and smoking pistol.

Jill?

“Run,” she urged.

Unable to find the strength in himself to flee, her words lit a fire beneath him, and the pain ebbed to a more manageable level. He leapt over the bar, glasses shattering as the countertop vibrated. The door was there, within arm’s reach.

“Jill!” he cried out. “C’mon!”

Her attention was on the patrons, now on their feet, shoulders twitching, heads cocked to the side.

“I’ll meet you on the other side,” she promised.

And he believed her.

* * *

**February 4 th, 1999.**

Jill had sworn that she would go home that night but hadn’t quite managed it. In the end, a kind nurse had guided her to an empty family room, and she had at least found a couple hours in a comfortable bed before she felt guilty taking up the space.

She wondered how long they would tolerate her, especially now that Carlos’s condition was deteriorating. Another seizure had hit during the night, and it took longer this time to help stabilise him. Jill was loathe to admit it, but he didn’t look so good either; his skin was almost as pale as it had been when they had wheeled him in and dark, heavy rings were visible beneath his eyes. His breathing, the doctor had advised, was becoming particularly problematic, and though the word ‘palliative care’ had yet to be mentioned, she had been given the distinct impression that was the next step.

They were on Day 4 now. Only 25% of the recorded patients in the downloaded data had survived to this stage. That figure fell to 2% on Day 5.

With every hour that passed, she realised they she was simply approaching the point where she would be burying the man she loved. There was no controlling this. It was chaos, pure and simple, but not the chaos of Raccoon City, where she was able to push emotions aside and plod along. No, this was a chaos of emotion itself.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said, resting her head against the padded back of the blue chair. “Ha, what stage of grief do they say that is? I don’t even know if you can hear me, but I know…I know I heard you, in the hospital in Raccoon City. I assumed I was dreaming, but I don’t think I was, see, ‘cause I woke up knowing I needed to find you. And it doesn’t make sense otherwise. So maybe that’s why I’m doing this – talking to you, hoping you can hear me and you’ll follow the sound of my voice.”

His eyes stopped moving for just a moment.

“If you come back, I’ll tell you everything. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you, if that’s what it takes. Because I don’t know what the future holds, or even how long it will be, but I know that I want you there. And maybe when this is all over we can…I don’t know, maybe we can enjoy that peace together. You still need to take me to Colombia, like you promised, and I… I still need to tell you that I love you. So just…stay with me. _Please_.”

* * *

Carlos stumbled into a darkened room, falling onto threadbare carpet. He was wearing tactical gear again, khakis and blacks, with a pistol secured in a holster on his thigh and a rifle slung over his shoulder. A shoulder that continued to ache and throb.

Where was he now? Back in Spencer Memorial, fending off a never-ending wave of monsters, the shapeless entity drawing ever closer? Was he in the NEST beneath Raccoon City, trapped behind a pane of glass, able to do nothing but watch as the Nemesis tore Jill apart? Maybe it was a tent in their original Delta Platoon base of operations, hearing the screams of the civilians as the horde bore down on them? No, he’d been to all those places before and whatever it was that constructed these lovely scenarios didn’t seem to like repeating itself.

Wherever he was, he knew that something was definitely wrong. The exhaustion was deepening; he was asleep already, he knew that, but he felt the call of something deeper pulling him. The skin around his eyes felt tight, his head too heavy to support without monumental effort.

If his wounds weren’t healing, would he die in real life if he died in the dream? He knew he sure as hell would if he let the Nothing swallow him up, thought that was the end game – so long as he could outrun it, he was safe, and eventually one of the doors would lead to home. But now, even without the wounds he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep running. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel already and here, prying apart the wooden slats, he found that whatever it was he needed to do, he just couldn’t do it alone.

A phone rang above him.

Above him?

With great effort, he pushed himself to his feet, digging the barrel of his rifle into the carpet. He was in a museum, had to be. Gothic architecture, ancient paintings, a vase nobody in their right mind would display at home. It smelled mildly of damp too, of things ancient that were best left forgotten.

There was a pedestal in the middle of the room, home to a brown telephone, one of the old ones with the circular dials. The handset vibrated as it rang and he limped towards it, picked it up and pressed it to his ear.

“Maybe that’s why I’m doing this,” said a voice on the other end, clear and strong. “Talking to you, hoping you can hear me, and you’ll follow the sound of my voice.”

“Jill,” he breathed. “Tell me you can hear me this time.”

“If you come back, I’ll tell you everything. I’ll spend the rest of my life making it up to you, if that’s what it takes.”

The line crackled, her voice wavered.

There was a lingering uncertainty that became clear to him now, as her voice filled him with a warmth that felt wholly alien in this place. This wasn’t a trick of the mind. This was really her, out there, somewhere. In the facility? Maybe. Or in a hospital somewhere? Wherever it was, she was there, and he wanted to be there too. Had to be. Hadn’t he promised her that, in Raccoon City and a thousand times since? He didn’t know what he was to her anymore, but something in her voice told her that she needed him and that was enough.

More than that, he knew that he couldn’t go out like this, not fading away in his sleep when he still had so much to do and much, much more to say. Not after everything he had been through. Fuck his exhaustion, fuck his self-pity.

“Jill, I’m coming,” he promised her. “I...I don’t know how, but I’m coming. Just hold on. Please. I’m not gonna leave you, and I- I don’t want to die.”

The line fell dead, a heavy tone reverberating through the handset.

“Jill? Jill!”

A scream rang out. Upstairs? Down the hallway…somewhere.

The handset slid from his grip and he hobbled towards the sound, through the only door in that small room and out into a hallway, long and dark, with high windows framed by velvet curtains. Rain pelted the glass and thunder rumbled in the distance. Every few seconds, sharp flashes of light illuminated the hallway, all mahogany beams and dark corners. Like a damn haunted house.

The carpet was damp beneath his steps, and he followed the path out into a foyer, large and bright, with a wide staircase in the centre, wrapping around the room and up two floors. The scream echoed again, and he moved with more urgency, leapt two steps at a time.

Something fell from the second floor, landed before him with a crack that split the floorboards. The creature’s muscles glistened in the harsh light, fatty pockets in sharp relief, spreading a mottled pattern across the pink. Long teeth bared, a longer tongue flicked menacingly from between them. The exposed brain seemed to throb in time with his own pulse as he watched its movements.

In the end, it moved too fast for him to predict and he cried out as its claws cut across his chest, tearing through the fabric of his fatigues and carving deep welts into the flesh there. It was pain unlike anything he had felt before, weakened every muscle in his body. The floor vibrated excitedly beneath him, furniture rattled like the crash of eager feet on a stadium floor. Something was baying for blood, and this creature was about to deliver it.

He raised his rifle, but it sagged uselessly in his hands, every movement bringing with it a fresh wave of agony.

The creature screeched, rose on its hind legs…and the brain peeled away from the skull, separated into pieces against the barrel of a shotgun. The tremors stopped as what remained of the licker fell to the floor and something grabbed Carlos by his shoulder straps.

“Come on!”

“Jill?”

He blinked up at her, confused.

“Fucking _move!_ ”

Apparently he did need to be told twice, but not three times. But moving wasn’t as easy as she implied. For one, his legs appeared to be intent on failing him, and rivulets of blood poured from open wounds in his chest. One or perhaps both of these things brought a haze to his vision.

Something wailed angrily and the walls began to shake again. Jill pulled on his shoulder straps once more, wedged an arm beneath him and somehow supported most of his weight on her slight frame.

“Fine,” she grunted. “I’ll fucking carry you, just move your damn legs.”

* * *

Leon noticed something different when he woke. He wasn’t in his hotel, but that didn’t surprise him, not really. Given everything that had happened, he hadn’t spent much time there lately.

The sunlight suggested early morning, and he could hear the distant rumble of Barry’s voice echoing through the house.

The mattress dipped as a weight pressed against its edge and he rolled his head to the side, watched as two hands clasped shut a maroon bra against smooth, pale skin.

For once in his life, he was truly lost for words. He dug deep inside of him, pulled together all the scraps of emotion, looked at each one in turn and tried to make sense of it all. There were pieces that glistened in the light, others like frosted glass. All of them felt heavy in his hands, like precious jewels he could not comprehend the value of but knew to break them would be devastating.

There was a vulnerability in his nakedness, even covered by the thin bedsheet, that brought a blush to his cheeks as Claire turned and smiled at him.

“Morning, sunshine,” she said cheerily.

If you’d told him that barely eight hours ago she had been crying into his shoulder, he wouldn’t have believed you if he hadn’t seen it himself. She was unflappable, taking her moments of weakness as they came and refusing to let them define her. Quite frankly, he was in awe.

“You were really gonna let me wake up alone, huh?” he teased.

“You’re a big boy,” she said, pulling a faded band T-shirt over her head. “You gonna let a little girl like me damage your pride?”

He considered his answer, wondered what approach to take. While he valued the comfort that came after the act, he was glad to wake alone, however the press of her flesh to his had made him feel. Falling asleep with her in his arms had been enough – the morning needed a clean break and that had never been something he had been all too good at. When a friendship was on the line he truly worried what his lowkey dependency would mean if she had clung to him.

“Ha,” he settled on. “You assume my pride is intact.”

Claire guffawed, and he decided that he liked that sound. It pre-empted her rolling back onto the bed, now fully clothed (and with damp hair – when had she showered?).

“Look,” she said. “Last night…”

She trailed off, leaving this as something they decided together, assuming they were both on the same page.

“Was not a mistake,” he assured her. “But it was…a night.” That was all it could be, all either of them could give right now.

She nodded, relieved. Part of him was saddened by this, but he quashed it, knew it was a part of him that needed to die, along with the rest of the rookie. That wasn’t who he was any more. Wasn’t who he needed to be. It wasn’t who she needed him to be.

“Thank you. For…being there for me.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he reached up, placed a hand on the side of her jaw and rubbed a thumb over the swell of her cheek.

“Glad I could help.”

There was a part of him that was being facetious, but she only saw the part that meant it. She considered him for a moment, pressed a fingertip to his chest and traced the line between his pectoral muscles – a line she wouldn’t know hadn’t been there when they had met back in September.

“I’m leaving,” she said. It was a statement so sudden and yet delivered so casually that it winded him.

“L-leaving?”

Claire nodded, her eyes where her finger touched his warm skin.

“I’ve been thinking about it and…I have a promise to keep. To Sherry. I have to finish my studies too and I can’t do that here. So, I’m going to go back, graduate, and…uh, one of my friends actually mentioned this group that’s forming. Like…a humanitarian group. They’re helping the people affected by Raccoon City, challenging the people in charge. At the moment it’s mostly protests but they’re talking about getting more organised and…I think I’d be good at that.”

Leon smiled.

“You know what? I think you would.”

His words inspired a smile and she flopped down a little further onto the mattress. He wasn’t just being encouraging; he really could see her screaming at politicians, whipping lawmakers into shape. She was someone who Got Shit Done, maybe not the way he or Chris did, but in a way that was equally as effective.

“I haven’t told Chris yet,” she said. “I mean, I’m going to hang around here a while, but… If the worst happens, Jill’s gonna need him and he’s gonna need me. They both will.”

He wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t predict what was going to happen and all the signs pointed to the worst. He didn’t want to patronise her with a hopeful lie. She was worth more than that.

“Just remember to think of yourself in the middle of all this,” he asked. “I know you, Claire. You take care of other people and you forget all about yourself.”

He wanted to offer her more, to say that he would always be there, but he couldn’t promise that. Who knew where his job would take him tomorrow? All he could promise her was that he would never let her down, or Sherry. They were a family. A weird little family. Nothing could ever take that away from them.

“Okay,” Claire said, smiling again. “As long as you can promise me the same. Now come on, help me change these sheets before Jill gets back.”

* * *

Jill inspected the wound on his chest, had removed his vest completely. Looking down, Carlos saw nothing but blood, flowing past puckered chunks of flesh. Every time he blinked, his eyes closed a little longer, wooed him with the comfort the darkness offered.

But when they opened, he saw her, and if that wasn’t a damn good reason to ensure they continued to open then he didn’t know what was.

“This isn’t good,” she muttered. She ran her fingers along the curve of his shoulder then down to another wound on his forearm. That touch may not have been real, but it sure as hell felt it.

“Usually when you’re in my dreams you’re wearing a lot less clothing,” he chuckled.

She glared at him, and he wasn’t sure if he melted or thawed. She wore a uniform familiar to him but only in the way of someone who looked back on a memory that wasn’t theirs. All blue, from her beret to those functionally useless shoulder pads.

“Look around you,” she said. “You really think this is your dream?”

She had dragged him to a dark, musty bedroom, had checked in the closet and beneath the bed before tending to his wounds. The wallpaper was peeling, the mirror above an ornate dresser cracked, reflecting all before it in a kaleidoscopic image.

He had never seen this place before.

“Spencer mansion,” he said.

Jill nodded grimly as she pressed a poultice of red and green herbs into his wounds. He didn’t know what they were or what she was doing, but it helped with the pain at least.

“But I’ve never been here,” he said.

Was she real? Was dream walking even possible? Even if it was, why would she risk so much to find him? She wouldn’t. Not practical, responsible Jill Valentine.

No, she would. Because that’s exactly who she was. Practical and responsible but also caring and brave. She was the best parts of all of them. She was certainly the best part of him.

“Yes, you have,” she said. “I took you there, remember? In the farmhouse.”

_He looked at her in the way one would look at a hole they had poked in a sack of sand, trying in vain to shove the grains back inside as they poured out ever faster. This strong, beautiful woman, coming apart at the seams. She pushed her tears away in vain, tried to hide her face from him._

_‘Stop,’ he wanted to say. ‘There is no shame in this. You don’t have to be strong anymore. You’re safe, I’m here and whatever demons are clawing at the door, they’ll have to face both of us.’_

Now he recognised the images that her words had built as she talked him through that night, in the desperation of one with a secret that was burning a hole in their soul. He had taken on that pain, for reasons he did not truly understand at the time, had made it his own. Why had his subconscious brought him here?

“We have to keep moving,” she said. “If that thing finds you it’s game over. It’s getting angry, but that means it’s getting reckless too. You’re making it fight more than it thinks is fair.”

She leaned back to observe her work, not quite happy with what she saw but settling for it anyway.

“So you’re here to save me?” He couldn’t hide the amusement from his voice. He knew this was serious, knew the stakes, but when she wasn’t smiling he always felt that it was his duty to fix that, whatever it took.

“ _You’re_ here to save you. I’m just here to remind you to try.”

Something rumbled in the bowels of the mansion, like the very walls themselves were alive and waking up. Jill’s head snapped around, concern etched into her features.

“Think you can run?” she asked.

He considered it. The sheets he sat upon were a dark shade of red now, as was his shirt. He couldn’t feel his right leg below the knee and every breath tore through him like a thousand knives. He wasn’t even sure he could walk at that point, but she was asking him, and he couldn’t let her down.

“Depends how much in your personal space you’re gonna let me get,” he said. It was a joke, but she nodded like he’d given her an order and hooked an arm beneath his shoulders.

Jill was not this strong, he realised as she hauled him to his feet and took almost his entire weight without so much as a buckle of the knees. He was pushing 200lbs now, was almost twice as wide as her at the shoulders, and more than a few inches taller. But she carried him like he weighed nothing.

They were slower together, but he found that if he leaned on her, he could limp a little faster – maybe not fast enough to outrun a licker but more than enough to slip past a zombie.

A now-familiar shriek had begun to sound in the distance, rattling the windowpanes. The Nothing drifted in through cracks and holes, and the lightning continued to illuminate the sky outside.

Carlos found that he did not have the presence of mind to fully consider the danger he was in, but Jill’s pace quickened, his bad leg dragging behind her stride.

She swore beneath her breath, looking left and right at forks in the hallway, searching for something.

“The front door,” he said as realisation hit. “There were symbols in…in the glass. That has to be it.”

Jill shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Not that one.”

That one? He knew the deal by now – there was always one door, it always stood out, and it always led into darkness. It wouldn’t always be there at first, but it would appear when he needed it, offering a way out.

“Jill, I know-“

“No, you don’t.” It was a cold, hard fact. “If you did, I wouldn’t be here.”

The light above their head gave out, glass raining down on them. Jill screamed, and he pulled her to him, sharply enough that they both tumbled to the ground. It was a stumble the Nothing capitalised on, sliding across the torn carpet, blocking their route ahead.

“No!” Jill screamed. “No, no, no.”

The sound tore through him, terrified him more than the wail.

“We’ve got this,” he said. “C’mon.”

He tried to stand, but his muscles gave out. The Nothing swallowed the end of the hallway, climbed up the walls they had stumbled past, tore a cavern in the floor.

They were trapped.

The wail cut closer now, fell to a laughing, mocking tone.

 _Nowhere to run_ , it seemed to taunt. _Nowhere to hide. I have you now. This is how you die._

Carlos propped himself up against the wall, leaned back into it. Jill had done the same across the hallway, their legs entwined, a sheen of sweat illuminating her skin. She was beautiful, even more so now.

“Hey,” he said. “If…if this is it, there’s something…something I gotta tell you.”

She shook her head vigorously, her lips settling into a hard, defiant line.

“Don’t,” she warned. “Don’t give up. You can’t give up.”

His laughter was swallowed by the wail, the tremors now threatening to tear the floorboards beneath them apart. Something breached the Nothing, but he dared not look at it.

“I’m not,” he promised. “Never. But I don’t know how we’re getting out of this one.”

“We don’t have to. Only you.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

The pain flared, and he let out a cry that burned his throat.

“Hey!”

She reached over, held his hand, and for a moment all was quiet. She looked into his eyes and he saw her again, looking down at him in that hallway above the greenhouse, terrified, pleading. Death was circling overhead and the only thing that had crossed his mind was making sure she was okay, comforting her in his own final moments.

He thought of her, the real her, thought of Claire and Barry…even Chris. He thought of Oscar back home, running his father’s auto shop; and his mother, waiting for a promised visit she probably didn’t expect him to honour. What about Connor and the rest of his family in New York? There were movies out soon that he wanted to see, a book he’d been trying to finish for the better part of six months. He didn’t want out of this place, he wanted a way back to them.

‘I’ve been looking for a way out, not a way home,’ he realised. ‘Running _from_ something, not _to_.’

Wasn’t that how he had got so lost in the first place? Running from his past, from one mistake to another. He’d never looked forward, only back. Now, he chased door after door, eager to escape, not quite caring where he ended up so long as he left the present horror behind. He lacked _focus_.

A sliver of light appeared at the edge of his vision and Jill looked up, eyes wide, mouth dropping silently.

“Carlos, get up,” she pleaded. This again? “The door. The door!”

He turned his head and the world spun slowly. In the darkness, a face sneered and long, curved claws dug into the wall, dragged something monstrous along. The teeth, long and sharp, protruded from a lipless mouth beneath a single eye, the other stapled into folds of flesh.

On the wall to his left he saw a white door, the woodwork freshly painted and far too clean to belong here. Jill dug her fingers into his armpits, hauled him up and pressed him to it.

“I can’t open it,” she said. “Only you can do that. But you have to go, now! I’ll hold it off, I’ll buy you some time.”

_She was gone, on the other side of a latticed metal shutter. The creature didn’t regard him at all, lost interest the second she had rolled away from him._

“No! I’m not leaving you again.”

“I’m not real,” she reminded him. “Out there, there’s a Jill waiting for you. The real one. The one you love. Think about her if you can’t spare a thought for yourself. You’re running out of _time_.”

He watched her, facing down that thing again, ready to die for what she believed in. So infectious was her bravery, he’d taken it to that rooftop too, would have fought just as valiantly if Nicholai hadn’t gotten the jump on him. That’s why she was here, wasn’t it? Because he needed help, needed someone to push him across that finish line and of course his brain had conjured the image of her, the only one who could shoulder that burden.

He pressed down on the handle and light spilled into the hallway.

“Don’t they say never to step into the light?” he shouted.

Jill smiled, stepped back, turned to the baying monster and sneered at it.

“Depends what’s waiting on the other side,” she said.

With the last of his energy, Carlos threw himself over the precipice and let the light carry him down.

There was no crush of pressure, no loss of consciousness. Just an eternal fall; endless vertigo. There was no ground rushing up to meet him, no angelic song welcoming him through pearly gates. No hellfire.

The pain in his shoulder and his chest burned, spread through his limbs and settled into an aching pressure. Everything fucking hurt.

The light flickered, dulled into grey on the edges of his vision, retracted into a yellow halo.

Sound rushed in, all beeps and whirs, and a cry that sent the last fragment of his consciousness spiralling towards an inevitability he didn’t quite understand.

He was in a room. Dark and grey, a single light above him. A soft mattress cushioned aching limbs, pillows propped up his head at an almost uncomfortable angle. Something was wedged down his throat, choking him. He clawed at his neck, but his hands caught on soft plastic tubing.

There were voices now, shouting at one another in Spanish.

“Take it easy,” one of them said. Directed at him? “I know this is uncomfortable, but we need you to relax.”

He did, and the pressure in his throat dissipated as something was pulled gently from it. He felt another sort of pressure now, down his nose and between his legs. He tried to move his arms but one of them felt heavy and warm.

“Can you hear me?” asked another voice. A light shone in his eye and he flinched against it. “Can you tell me your name?”

“C-Car-los,” he spluttered. Ok, talking hurt, let’s not do that.

He was in a hospital, he realised. The voices, they belonged to doctors and nurses. They reassured and interrogated him in equal measure. How did he feel? How many fingers were they holding up? Could he tell them his birthday? Did he know where he was?

They answered none of his, only reassured him that he was safe and well taken care of. He asked only as many as his aching throat would allow, and eventually they seemed satisfied with whatever the machines around him told them and left him to peace and quiet.

This was real. It had to be. The pain hit just right, the exhaustion felt physical, and the comfort the softness beneath him offered felt long overdue.

That was the first thing he realised. The second was that he was not alone.

When the last of the staff filed out, one figure remained, pressed into a corner, a hand to their mouth. He almost didn’t recognise them. They wore black jeans and a thick blue sweater, their short brown hair mussed up on one side, blue eyes looking as tired as he felt.

They stared at him for a long disbelieving moment. His brain questioned his reality again, but no, this was real. This was definitely her. It had to be.

“Hey, Supercop,” he said. The words were worth the pain.

Jill darted forward in one quick motion, locked her fingers in his and leaned so close to him that their foreheads touched. She laughed, and the soft brush of her hair against his cheek reassured him of her presence.

At long last, he was at peace. He was home.


	14. Mother Tongue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jill had been right. There was something they had in common.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...this is it. Kind of. This is the last full chapter, but there will be a shorter epilogue to bow out properly and round off this story. It has been an absolute ride!
> 
> I will say this again next chapter, but thank you so much for all of your support and sweet comments. Honestly, you have kept me going with your love and enthusiasm. With the fandom/ship quieting down in the last couple months it's especially great to see people sticking around. I love this ship and I'm having so much fun writing for it so as long as the ideas keep coming to me and as long as you all are enjoying reading I will do my best to contribute to keeping the tag alive :). I do have one more story that I have started planning, and I'll post a little more about it with the next update for anyone who is interested.
> 
> Stay safe!

Jill couldn’t understand why her hands trembled so much. She knotted and unknotted her fingers, stretched and pulled them, then shoved her hands into her pockets when that didn’t help.

In the elevator an uncomfortable heat built beneath her collar, so she shrugged out of her coat and slung it over one arm. Despite this flush, the reflection that stared back at her from the smooth mirrored walls seemed a touch paler than the last time they had met.

Was it lack of sleep that set her strange? She had spent most of the night staring up at the ceiling and the rest going through a paper sheath of photographs stashed in her suitcase. It wasn’t the first time she had looked through them since ‘the accident’, but it was the first time she had observed the glossy lines of Carlos’s face with something more productive than grief.

That was it, she realised as the elevator doors opened and she stepped out onto into the hustle and bustle of the ward, counting doors until she found the one she was looking for. First date nerves. That amused her. First date nerves were for first dates, not for meeting with a man who had spent the last six months getting to know her in increasingly intimate ways.

Carlos had a room of his own on the general care ward, apparently still too much of an unknown to risk dropping in with the general population. They had kicked her out as soon as they had decided on the move, reminding her that the ICU visiting hour rules had been broken for her only when they were convinced he was on his deathbed, and now that he was awake, alive and grouchy enough to snap at them when they poked him, she could return the next day along with everyone else.

When she entered he was sitting on the edge of his bed, dressed in grey sweatpants and a white T-shirt, looking down at his toes as they clenched and straightened experimentally.

He looked up, and for a moment seemed to stare straight through her.

“Hey,” he said when his brain caught up with him and an uncertain smile twisted his lips.

“Toes still working?”

He nodded, and the smile felt warmer now.

“They even let me take a walk this morning,” he said. “An actual walk. I’m a rock star.”

Jill laughed and sat at his left side, her coat still folded in her arms.

“How did that go?”

“Terribly. I nearly took down an orderly. Feeling a bit stronger, though.”

The fingers that poked out of his cast stretched just a little, extended a silent invitation. Letting her coat rest on her lap, she reached across and slid her fingers in his, feeling the contrasting roughness of the plaster and his palm. No sooner had their skin made contact, she saw tension release from his shoulders, like a string had been cut.

Just like that, her good cheer was gone.

“Still?” she asked.

He nodded, gaze fixed on their hands.

“This is real,” she assured him. “I know me saying that isn’t going to make it easier to believe but trusting me is a good step in the right direction.”

Ah yes, trust; the thing she had broken.

She expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. It was a free pass, almost. He was too raw to find shelter in the loneliness he had entertained prior to their fateful mission; he needed someone, and she was all he had. Jill did not once think of capitalising on it. If anything, it made her more eager to square things, to polish them to a sheen and pack them back on the shelf filled with commemorations of her bad decisions and wrong turns – the ones she tried so hard to learn from.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

He didn’t answer straight away, just stared at their entwined fingers with a glazed expression. It was a look that pricked goosebumps on her skin.

“No.” He swallowed, rolled more words around his tongue, then…nothing.

The pain that followed was heartache, but not the kind she was used to. She wanted to pull him into her, to hold him and comfort him, but did she even have the right to do that anymore?

Neither of them knew of the right words to break the silence between them, so they indulged it for a while. His fingers tightened around her own every time she moved, and she tightened hers in turn. The cycle repeated in increments perhaps too slight to be noticed, until his fingertips dug into her knuckles and he breathed heavily through his nose.

“Claire seemed happy to see you earlier,” she said when she could bear the quiet no longer. “She missed you.”

“I kinda got the impression.”

The hand that held hers raised, not once breaking its hold, and Jill snickered into her free hand. On the back of his wrist, someone had drawn a stick figure in a cape and an oversized T-shirt with the initials ‘MM’ emblazoned on the front. She asked about this and he shook his head.

“Mercenary Man, apparently.”

The snicker became a rolling laugh and he narrowed his eyes at her.

“Think you can do better?” he goaded. “The Sharpie is still on that table.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Supercop and Mercenary Man, huh?”

A smile flashed in his eyes but didn’t quite make it to his lips. He looked away, like he’d been caught staring a beat too long. It was a shyness that was so uncharacteristic for him she wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Thank you for getting me out of there, by the way,” he said. “Seems silly, but…I realised I never said it.”

“We weren’t just going to leave you there.”

An awkward silence fell.

“Listen-“ they both said. Laughter followed, none of it flowing with intent.

“Me first,” she said, calling dibs on first pull in the Russian Roulette she had been talking herself up for all morning. “I owe you a lot of things. And I know right now you’re just trying to keep your head above water, but if you want answers I’m here, and I’m not sure I have them all, but I’ll try. For you.”

It was far less than what she owed him, really. Far less than what he deserved. She wasn’t even sure if he wanted to hear her out, and she prepared to fight his corner, to push until he let her in enough that he didn’t force himself to go through this alone. Their relationship was not what mattered anymore. He was.

Carlos nodded, and his grip on her hand finally loosened.

Where did she even start?

“I meant what I said,” she told him. “I do want to be with you. And that scares me. It scares me because I’m trouble. Not the kind that gets you disowned or arrested…the kind that gets you killed.”

He let out an impatient sort of huff.

“You’re saying all this even after Raccoon City? After everything we went through? You walked away because you thought you were gonna get me killed?”

He channeled anger the likes of which she had never seen in him before. There was no regulator on his emotions here, no temperance.

“No,” she pressed, and his lips closed in a firm line. “I thought I was going to put you on his radar.”

Carlos blinked, confused but hiding it well.

“Wesker,” she elaborated.

He looked away with a stiff upper lip, his nose wrinkled, and he nodded.

“Wesker. Your old Captain?”

It was her turn to nod.

“He holds grudges, Carlos. And he’s cruel. He used Barry’s family against him, Chris’s too. If he decided to come after us he would tear his way through everything and everyone we care about. He’d hurt you just to get at me. Maybe when he was just Captain Wesker that wouldn’t be an problem, but he’s different now. Whatever he is, he could-“

She couldn’t. Saying it aloud did nothing but dredge up memories of a dream almost forgotten, stirred the emotion it had left in its wake. It nudged fear that was still too recent and too real. When she looked up, Carlos was looking back at her. He may have been angry, but he softened as his eyes searched her face, finding something there that tugged on something that ran far deeper than fury.

“I thought by pushing you away I could protect you,” she explained. Her eyes stung, and the corners of her lips twitched threateningly every time she paused. “It’s stupid, but it’s the only way I knew you’d be safe. That’s all I wanted; to protect you.”

It sounded so fucking stupid now that she said it aloud. Maybe if she’d just stood in front of a mirror and had this conversation with herself before she’d pulled the trigger, they could have avoided this whole sorry mess.

“You couldn’t have just told me this from the start?”

“I knew you’d talk me out of it. That I’d believe you, and then you’d be dead, and it would be my fault for not being strong enough. But I lied and you still got hurt and it didn’t change a damn thing. It didn’t hurt any less. If anything, I made things worse.”

He looked away again, his expression unreadable. He was still holding her hand – that, at least, was something.

“You really think that’s your decision to make, huh?” he said, calmly. She didn’t know what to say. When his eyes snapped back to her, met hers with a cold sharpness, his jaw was set, and his brow furrowed in anger. “What if I don’t care? What if that was a risk I’d be happy to take? You don’t have to be okay with that. That’s not your burden to bear. If I die tomorrow it’s because I fucked up, not you. You think you get to decide how, when and why someone cares for you? This is survivor’s guilt – I’ve seen it before. Hell, I’m still going through it myself. You can’t protect people by pushing them away. Fuck’s sake Jill, are you that afraid of losing that you can’t even settle for a draw?”

His anger wasn’t directed at her, she knew that. It was a dam breaking, one she had constructed. But it washed over her all the same and she shivered as it eroded the armour she had spent the last few weeks donning, leaving her with nothing but her shame.

“This Wesker guy? If he shows his face I’ll take a step back unless you ask otherwise. Not for your comfort or mine, but because it’s personal and I get that. But I’m not going to let you use that as an excuse to drive a wedge between us.”

Sometimes Jill was the unstoppable force. Sometimes she was the immovable object. She did not bend or bow or break unless the pressure applied was her own. It had spelled the death of past relationships, cut them short before they had the chance to flourish. She was too stubborn, they had said. They would push and she would shove and eventually they would topple and walk away, deciding the fight just wasn’t worth it.

Carlos didn’t. She had pushed and he had stumbled, but once he had realised the intent behind it he stood strong, and now he was squaring up to her, digging his heels into the dirt. He was fighting for her.

She wasn’t used to that.

“I’m sorry, Carlos,” she said. “For so many things. Let me make it up to you. Maybe we can’t pick up where we left off, but let’s start somewhere fresh. Just don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave. I need you, and I don’t think I’m so bold in saying that I think you need me too right now.”

Silence fell again as he considered this. For a short, harrowing moment she felt he would say no, that some wounds ran too deep and sometimes one chance was more than someone deserved.

“Ok,” he said. “I’ll stay. But I don’t want what we had.” Her heart fell into her stomach, left an open, echoing cavern of a hole behind. “I don’t want to be your booty call, or a lover of convenience. I don’t want just the part of you that can’t reconcile what you feel with what you think is right. I want all of you; the good, the bad, the ugly. I want you to trust me with all of that or none of it. ‘Cause I can’t go on pretending I don’t feel the way I do about you, and playing this game ain’t fair on either of us. If you don’t want that, you tell me right now and I’ll lick my wounds and we can start to move forward as friends. It’s either you want it, or you don’t. No excuses, no half measures.”

He was asking a lot. More than anyone ever had. More than she had ever asked of herself. But she had known the answer long before he had asked.

She opened her mouth to reply, but the words she had strung together seemed weak and inadequate in the moment. So, she reached over to the table at the bottom of the bed, took the black pen there in her hand and began to write on his cast.

_Eres el amor de ma vida._

His eyes followed the tip, watched every squeaky letter form. When she was done, he faltered. Whatever strength he had found, the anger that had propped him up, it left him in a sharp breath. Had he not expected her to agree? Was he setting himself up for another excuse, another let-down?

“That’s a hard yes, by the way,” she said, just to clarify.

There was a glossy sheen to his eyes that had been absent a moment ago, but he still said nothing. He breathed through his nose, looked up to the ceiling and the smile that cracked through his stoicism was genuine and radiated a happiness that reached her too.

“It’s, uh, _mi_ vida, by the way,” he said at last.

“What?”

“Eres el amor de _mi_ vida.”

“You sure?”

“J- I…honestly don’t know what to say to that.”

“Would you know what to say to ‘I love you’? Because I do, and I’m fairly sure I know the English for that.”

“I’d say I love you too, even if you do butcher my mother tongue.”

She hadn’t been expecting that. True, she had felt for some time that it was all building up to this, but to hear those words, to see in his eyes that he really, truly meant them…she hadn’t prepared herself for the sheer intensity of the happiness that washed over her. So, instead of slapping him playfully the way he had expected with his anxious deflection, her eyes flitted to his lips.

“Can I kiss you?” she asked.

He smiled.

“You better.”

He tasted like hospital sterility and sweetness, like a favourite drink that you’d almost forgotten the taste of and a failed attempt to scrub that clean. There was hunger in his kiss that she hadn’t expected, leashed and tempered. In hers there was no fear now, no paranoia, just him and her and whatever time they had. She didn’t care who may have been walking past, or even how sloppy her kiss became in an effort to get ever closer to him.

It was not time or want that pulled them apart, but a sharp inhalation of pain when he twisted to better hold her. He did not move but she did, hand on his cheek, pushing his long hair out of his face as she studied his handsome features in concern.

His eyes were squinted shut, but his lips curled into a grimace that was more akin to embarrassment than hurt.

“Cockblocked by my own obliques,” he said. “Maybe we…should take it slow for a while.”

Jill laughed and rested her forehead against his, their noses gently touching. The stillness of the moment and the closeness of him were enough for her.

“You were in my dream, you know,” he said, pulling back when his breaths returned to a steadier rhythm. “Right at the end. I think you saved my life.”

“I think you did that on your own. You found your way back. All I did was sit here.”

“You talked to me.”

She blinked, felt a blush rise to her cheeks.

“And you talked to me, back in Raccoon City. I was only following your lead.”

“You were by my side,” he clarified.

“And I always will be.”

He looked at her, then she felt his hand warm against her cheek and his lips pressed against hers in a chaste yet firm kiss that somehow still lit a fire in her chest.

In the end, with the promise of what lay ahead, she found it hard to lament the things she could no longer change. Mistakes were made to be learned from, after all. Her only regret was taking so long to realise that Umbrella’s end was not all that they were fighting for. It was a mistake she swore never to make again.

* * *

Chris was the kind of man who cared deeply about others, even if he wasn’t always great at showing it. Some felt he came across cold and abrasive, and while that was true there was a side to him that was warm and loving, that would remove a few of his own layers just to keep you warm when the days turned cold. Claire knew the latter well. When their parents had passed and they were shunted from foster home to foster home, he was the constant she needed, always keeping her within arm’s reach, making sure she had everything she needed before he even considered himself.

It was no surprise to her when, the afternoon Jill had called to tearfully declare that Carlos was awake and responsive, his energy had left him in one fell swoop, and would not return even after a good night’s sleep.

He was an anxious mess, everything he had been holding back so that he could be what Jill needed him to be hitting like an avalanche. He worked his way through half a pack of cigarettes before realising that they did nothing to still the tremors in his hands, wondering when the relief would come.

When Claire found him in the garden, flicking the final filter into the usual bucket, he hadn’t realised how badly he had needed the company.

“Hey mister,” she said as she leaned against the wall next to him. “You’ve been gone a while.”

“How is he?”

Claire let out a little huff of a laugh.

“Spirited. You know him.”

He didn’t.

“What did the doctors say?”

“That he seems fine. Nothing abnormal, blood results all clean. They’re probably going to discharge him later.”

Chris fumbled around in the cigarette carton then decided against it and shoved the crumpled thing back into his pocket.

“There is that whole toxic masculinity problem though,” she added. “There’s only so many times someone can insist they’re ‘fine’ before it’s pretty damn obvious they’re not, y’know?”

He felt the side-eye before he saw it and laughed humourlessly.

“I’m… _coping_ ,” he said.

Claire raised an eyebrow.

“It’s pronounced ‘smoking’.”

For a beat, he wondered who had raised her to be so stubborn, then realised that he had no-one but himself to blame.

“Alright, what do you want from me?” he asked with a soft laugh. He wasn’t angry. If anything, he was glad for the call out.

She slipped an arm through his and leaned in close, hugging him in a way she had often clung to him as a child.

“Have you spoken to him yet?”

“You really think that’s a good idea? Seeing me would just stress him out and I don’t want to cause a stroke or anything. Imagine that?”

They did need to talk at some point. Gone were the days where he could push him to the back of his mind and hope he just disappeared. Carlos was someone who was important to Jill – he needed to set things straight, make an effort. Even if they could never be friends, they at least needed to be able to share a room and exchange pleasant words. If he didn’t owe it to him, he sure as hell owed it to her. Trouble was, it wasn’t as simple as being pleasant – he was starting in the red, not at zero, had a lot to make up for before they could consider how to begin.

“I don’t think it would.”

“I can’t imagine he has an awful lot to say to me, anyway.”

“You don’t know him, so you can’t know that,” Claire said. “He’s a good guy, a _really_ good guy. And he cares a lot about Jill. Even if he hated you, he’d want to fix things for her. You’re lucky, really.”

“Thanks.”

Everything had turned out alright in the end. It always did, didn’t it?

“How are you holding up?” he asked when she let the silence grow.

She let out a non-committal hum and her grip on his arm tightened.

He wondered if he should bring up the subject of two nights ago but couldn’t decide if it would be too sore or too embarrassing for her. The others may have bought the story of Leon sleeping in Carlos’s room, but they hadn’t seen him sneak out of hers. It wasn’t his business, really, but he’d seen the kind of guys Claire hung around with, had met a couple of her meathead ex-boyfriends before she decided that introducing him to them just wasn’t worth the hassle. Leon was a good kid, had his head screwed on right and quite frankly, he was a catch. If there was something blossoming between them he didn’t want to scare the guy off. Better the devil you know.

Since then, she had seemed perhaps not happier but at least content. Ever since Antarctica, something had been missing, like a skipped step or a hair out of place. Maybe nobody else had noticed, but he did. Now, everything had settled into place, all edges smooth and neatly tucked.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” he asked. It seemed obvious, and the sudden start she tried to suppress answered for him.

“I…was thinking about it,” she said, honestly.

The chaos inside of him swirled, heated to the point where it singed the air in his lungs. The fear he had faced as he stared down her doppelganger returned for the briefest of moments, and he forced it back down into the darkness.

“My place is not here,” she said. “I’m not a soldier. We all have our parts to play in this, mine is just...somewhere else.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a plan?”

“I do!” she said with an unrestrained edge of excitement to her voice. “I’m gonna stick around for a while, make the most of Europe, you know? Then after Spring Break I’ll go back to college. There are a lot of people who still need help. People you swore to protect and serve, back in ’96. I think I can start there. Failing that…well, there’s a little girl who needs me, and I can’t let her down. I think you can empathise there.”

Who raised her to be so kind? It sure as hell wasn’t him. He identified his problems, pointed a gun at them and pulled the trigger if they didn’t go away. He saw giants to be slain, she saw the people they trampled on. She was a better person than he.

“Becca’s leaving too, you know,” he said. “Not ‘til later in the year but she’s been offered a place at Harvard.”

Claire nodded meekly. Of course. Girls talk.

“You said you’d be moving back to the US at some point. Maybe we won’t be leaving after all? Maybe we move together? If not, well…Jill’s always gonna be at your side, you know that, right?”

He did, but he didn’t. He didn’t know anything anymore. Things were changing. People were changing. Umbrella wasn’t, and it was beginning to look more and more like an unending shadow cast over them.

Maybe he was stuck in the past, clinging to ideals that had no place in a world like this. You had to adapt, evolve, and that wasn’t something he was all that good at.

* * *

The hospital couldn’t let him go without poking and prodding him some more. Carlos was starting to take it personally. They shone lights into his eyes, asked for one last urine sample, then showed him images of his own brain while explaining that everything looked normal. He’d cracked a joke about wanting a copy for his mother, they had laughed politely, and then asked if he wanted them to call him a cab.

Jill had promised to pick him up, so it was she he had called, the excitement in her voice spilling out over a tinny and echoing line. It gave him strength, something he found he had been uncomfortably lacking since waking.

Maybe that was the problem, the reason why he was struggling to distinguish reality from dream. He had fallen asleep in a world where she was hiding herself from him, had lit a match on the bridge between them. What he had woken to was the overwhelming rush of her presence, the sensation of her fingers entwined in his, her breath on his cheek, and the sound of her voice singing gratitude and dispelled fear. They had sat for hours in silence punctuated by as much conversation as his voice could handle. She never pushed him, didn’t question him, just let him heal in whatever way he needed. The nightmares that night were of a muted nature, and he attributed that entirely to her, and the promise she had left him with – to return the next day, and the next, for however long he was holed up there. For however long he needed. It felt almost too good to be true and he found himself waiting for the punchline, for the Nothing and the wailing form of the white woman.

He waited by the window, looking out into the gardens beyond. He’d walked through them with Jill earlier that morning, stealing kisses when they could. That felt more like a dream than anything had. If he was still dreaming, he wasn’t sure he wanted to wake up. Because here, she loved him. Here, he was happy.

The door opened and he turned, an expectant smile already twisting his lips.

Chris stopped in the doorway, looked at him as though awaiting permission.

“Jill,” Carlos said. “My, how you’ve changed.”

That got an eyeroll, and an expression of mild annoyance. She would have given him the same reaction were she here, but wasn’t half as appealing on Chris.

“Jill’s at home,” Chris explained. “I offered to come get you. How are you feeling?”

His words registered, but the meaning and intent floated somewhere in the parts of Carlos’s mind that had yet to fully reform.

“You ever had a catheter?”

Chris blinked.

“Uh…no.”

“Didn’t think so. You wouldn’t be asking that if you had.”

Chris closed his eyes, breathed through his nose. When he opened them again, he stepped further into the room, jangling his car keys in one hand.

“I suppose you’re not biting my head off, so I’ll take this an improvement,” he said.

If he’d wanted to argue, Carlos couldn’t have. He didn’t have the energy for petty fights, especially not with Chris Redfield.

“This all your stuff?” Chris asked, pointing at the holdall on the bed. Carlos nodded and Chris picked it up and slung it over one shoulder.

“Hey man, you don’t-“

“Don’t start with the macho bullshit. Your arm’s in a sling and you… Just…c’mon, I don’t like hospitals.”

Carlos had expected more, but Chris was already out the door.

Was he still so sure that he was awake?

Something nagged in the back of his mind; a memory forgotten, but one that had left an impression. He considered it as he followed Chris into the hallway, his steps still a little unsteady but getting ever stronger. Chris turned when he realised he was alone, waited a moment for him to catch up, and then led the way to the parking lot via an elevator ride that was too silent to not be awkward.

He was waiting for a catch, for a snide comment or insult, but none came. When they approached the car, Chris slung the bag into the back seat and waited patiently in the driver’s as Carlos eased himself into the passenger side, wincing as a bolt of pain shot through his obliques.

The door slammed shut and they were walled in with a silence that hung thick in the air. He considered cracking a joke, but none came to mind, and his throat appeared to have dried out. It still ached, along with everything else they had shoved a tube down, but he didn’t think physical pain was the true reason behind this particular soreness.

A long minute passed before he realised that Chris had not even inserted the key in the ignition. It remained in his hands, and he stared down at it, running a thumb over the smooth metal.

“Listen,” he said. “I owe you an apology. Pretty fucking big one, to be honest.”

“Most people get to know me before deciding I’m not worth their time. Thinkin’ maybe you just skipped ahead.”

Chris turned and regarded him from beneath raised eyebrows, but when he saw that he wasn’t joking he sat back and exhaled.

“You might be right. But Jill seems to think we have a lot in common. Figure we owe it to her to see if that’s true.”

Carlos laughed. Of course. Obligation.

“Did she put you up to this? She tell you to pick me up and not show your face until we were friends?”

“Nah man, this is all me.”

Like the crack of a whip, recollection snapped a memory into place. It wasn’t much of one, just a voice. He could barely remember the words, but he understood the intent now, even if he hadn’t back then.

“You were there,” he said. “When I was out, you where there. You spoke to me. Why?”

Chris worked his jaw, considered the words before he spoke them.

“Jill stayed by your side every minute you were in the ICU. You should have seen her, man. Looked like she should have been in a hospital bed herself. I talked her into taking a break, offered to tag out so you wouldn’t wake up alone. That’s what she was worried about, you know? Didn’t matter that she hadn’t eaten a damn thing, or that she could barely keep her eyes open. She just didn’t want you to wake up to an empty room.”

There were a lot of things Carlos had thought about Chris Redfield prior to that moment. He was arrogant, selfish, had anger issues, generally an all-around dickhead. The significance of that moment in the course of their relationship was that it cast all of them aside, reasoned them away until they seemed insignificant, excused even.

Jill had been right. There was something they had in common. They both loved her. Maybe not in the same way, but they both cared enough that seeing her in pain was something they couldn’t abide. While his prejudice did not make sense, his reaction to it now did. Some unhinged part of his mind had identified Carlos as a threat, and he had reacted the only way he knew how.

“She thinks the fucking world of you,” Chris continued. “And I know she’s done and said some stupid shit, but she’s still hurting from things that came before you. She’s the smartest person I know, but smart doesn’t mean shit when you’re hurting like that.”

Carlos looked at him, searched the lines of his face. He looked a lot like Claire, he realised now. And maybe he saw her in him in other ways, maybe they channeled that same chaotic energy, they just wielded it differently.

There was honesty in his apology, and that was worth something. It was a good foundation to build something upon.

“Claire mentioned you’d stayed with her,” he said. “Thank you. You say she thinks the world of me, but she cares a damn lot about you too. Never could figure out why, but I think I’m startin’ to see it now.”

With a laugh, Chris finally shoved his key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it.

“I think it’s gonna take a while for us to be friends,” Carlos said with an honest smile. “If we can get there. But let’s at least not be enemies. I think we’ve got enough of those and honestly…I don’t got the energy for that right now.”

Chris turned his right fist, held it towards Carlos’s in a physical offering of peace. His eyed widened when he saw the white sling that held it firmly to his chest, pointing in the other direction.

“Ah…shit.”

Carlos laughed. Really laughed. It sent fresh waves of pain up and around his ribcage, but he let it. Chris just threw him an awkward, apologetic look before he too was swept up in the dim hilarity of his own foolishness.

In the end, he extended his left hand and Carlos knocked his right fist against it.

“Your face is looking better by the way. Sorry I un-prettied you for a while.”

“Ha, it’s gonna take a lot more than your weak-ass right hook to un-pretty this work of art.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eres el amor de mi vida = you are the love of my life


	15. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even the most precarious roads lead, inevitably, home.

**March 25 th, 1999. Northern Spain.**

“Aren’t you supposed to be some award-winning marksman?”

Chris paused, lowered the hand in which he held a fresh dart and turned to Carlos with an expression that quite clearly read ‘the audacity of this bitch’.

“This is a personality trait, huh?” he asked. “It’s really sticking?”

Carlos shrugged, arms folded across his chest. He wore a smirk that would have infuriated Chris had the last couple months not seen the dynamic of their relationship shift and realign to something more palatable. Instead, he lined up another shot, hit a bullseye and of course flaunted this.

“When we’re back in the states, when we get our hands on some real firepower, we’ll see who’s a better shot.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a challenge or a threat,” Carlos chuckled. He stepped forward, waiting for Chris to clear the board, and then lined up his shot.

It wasn’t the nicest of bars, but it reminded Chris of his days in the Air Force, of a tiny, shitty little drinking hole near base that they would retreat to every Friday evening to let loose. He remembered the friendship he had forged with Barry in those days, and the squad mates that likely still followed that same old routine. It was funny how the circle closed sometimes.

Carlos landed a bullseye of his own and Chris winced. He was damn good, but of course his pride would never let him admit that. So, he knocked back a mouthful of beer and looked over to where Jill stood by the bar, cash in hand, two drinks before her and a presence hanging over her right shoulder.

“Looks like your girl’s in trouble,” he pointed out.

Immediately, Carlos snapped his head around, scanning the bar like a cheetah would the savanna, then turned back to the dart board unperturbed.

“Nah, she’s good.”

Jill’s shadow extended a hand that brushed gently against her lower back, leaned in closer to whisper something. Within seconds, her elbow had pressed his from the inside, and he was an arm’s length away from her. Chris could not see her face, but he saw the expression on the guy’s and laughed.

“See,” said Carlos.

The weeks had smoothed the difficult terrain between them but there were still cracks that they stepped around, heightened emotions that had yet to settle. But Chris was finding it increasingly difficult to justify those remnants of negative emotion, like shards he was still picking from a wound. In moments like these he found purchase on another, cast it aside like the useless thing it was.

Jill needed someone to give her space to be who she needed to be, someone who could keep pace with her, and someone who felt safe enough that she could allow herself to be vulnerable when needed. Whatever he had thought Carlos in the past, that’s exactly what he was for her. He was good for her.

“You’re up,” Carlos said, slapping Barry on the shoulder. “Unless you want to back out – I’d understand.”

Barry was caught somewhere between amusement and shock, and let out a deep, bellowing laugh.

“Son, you better buckle up.”

As he took his position, Jill returned with two beers in hand and set them both on their table before hopping upon a stool.

Rebecca and Claire remained by the jukebox, arguing over something but smiling all the same. And suddenly, Chris’s mood sank.

This would be the last night they were all together. Claire’s flight left at noon the next day, and Rebecca had decided to travel with her, to spend time with her family and her collection of textbooks before she packed up for college. He wasn’t sure how he felt about all this, other than a thread of anxiousness tied inexorably to Claire’s renewed departure from his life.

“Cheer up,” Jill urged when she saw his face. She leaned close and her arm brushed his lightly. “They won’t be gone forever.”

Of course they wouldn’t, but Chris was, as always, trapped in the here and now. She was the one that planned for the future, he just rolled with the punches.

“Yeah.”

“We found this nice place in town, by the way,” she said. “We could arrange a viewing for tomorrow afternoon – three bed, large living area, balcony. More than enough for four people. It’s a little above our budget but we only need it for a few weeks so we can take the hit. Especially now we have a little income.”

Chris looked at her for a moment, then remembered to smile.

So much had changed in such a small stretch of time. The evidence they had retrieved from Facility 23 had led to a suspension of business for Umbrella in Spain, and rumour had it that Portugal was soon to follow suit, with the UK and France not far behind. Another arm of their group in Germany had unearthed a few promising leads, and news of their work had begun to travel.

It had traveled far enough to attract the attention of a number of pharmaceutical companies claiming to be dedicated to holding Umbrella to account and willing to fund their group’s activities for the next year at least. None of them bought it – it was a publicity stunt, and an attempt to shoulder in on Umbrella’s market share – but it served their interests and allowed them to pursue leads that they never would have been able to consider prior. It was a symbiotic relationship rather than a partnership, but one that worked in their favour.

It allowed them the opportunity to return to the US, knowing the European operations were covered, and better placed them to support with the ongoing trial.

“We’ll be okay,” Jill assured him. “All of us.”

Maybe she was right. For the first time since that fateful July night, something resembling hope flickered to life inside of him.

* * *

**July 23 rd, 1999. Chicago, Illinois.**

The spray of the shower hit differently tonight. The water was hot enough to steam up the glass and the mirror beyond, but neither of them felt it. The only heat came from within, from the press of soft curves to hard muscle, lips to lips, and something else entirely against her abdomen.

Jill moaned into the humidity as Carlos’s lips burned a path across her collarbone, up the side of her neck, across her jaw, and then landed on her own in an open-mouthed kiss that stole the last of the air from her lungs. He seemed intent on consuming her, and she was finding it impossible to mind.

She trailed a hand down the damp hair on his chest, over hard muscle, and he sighed deeply as she took him into her hand, stroking his length in a rhythm that broke their kiss into short, desperate lunges.

“I…don’t wanna tell you to stop,” he panted. “But I…fuck, I…just wanna…”

Jill smirked, watching control slip past his grasp with every firm squeeze. Then, she stopped, and pressed her body firmly against his.

He growled in irritation, but wrapped his arms around her, let his hands wander as far as they could reach. She wouldn’t say, but she wasn’t sure how long she would last if they found the part of her aching the most for his touch.

Sex hit differently now. She wasn’t sure if it was the fact he had almost died, the utterance of ‘I love you’s, or if she had just been shutting herself off from him for too long, but quite frankly she could have spent the rest of the night in that shower, not really doing much other than enjoying him and his presence.

The months had not been easy, but finally she felt that they were getting to a place of comfort and peace, at least as much of one as they could swing given their situation. The weeks after his brush with death had been difficult, especially with his stubborn refusal to accept the doctors’ referral for psychiatric support. She had been there herself, understood his reasoning, and so had been for him what she had needed in her own dark times, waited for the wounds to smart a little less, guiding him when he found himself truly lost.

Slowly but surely, solid ground had reformed beneath his feet, and since their return to US soil you would have been hard pressed to tell that he had ever been through something so harrowing. For herself too, the return to the state she had grown up in and the first city she had grown to know had brought with it an unforeseen calm.

She was pulled from her thoughts by the press of lips to her cheekbone. The soft pat of water to her skin was hypnotic – she genuinely could have fallen asleep then and there, comfortable in his arms.

“Hey, Supercop,” he said, his voice rumbling in his chest. “You zoning out on me again?”

“Maybe I’m trying to convince you to carry me to bed.”

He laughed and she buried her head deeper against his neck, the scent of his shower gel flooding her senses. One hand sat in the gentle curve of his waist, and she allowed the other to drift between her thighs, sure to brush against him on its way. He chuckled low in his throat, and it turned to a sigh as she changed tactics, letting her fingers drift from the base of his cock to the tip, and then wrap around its generous girth to pick up where she left off.

“You’re hardly convincing me to move.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

The fingers of the hands that had been caressing her ass moved, fingers dug into the flesh of her thighs and he picked her up, spinning them both around and pinning her against the wall. She giggled and he laughed, and when he hungrily kissed the skin beneath her jaw it was her turn to moan and rock her hips against his.

There was little friction when he pushed into her, holding her to him with one arm around her waist. He was gentle, always was, until he was not. She was so much smaller than him she wondered if he was afraid of hurting her, then he would prove her wrong, test her boundaries and they would both revel in what they found there.

He held her tightly to him as she came, thrusting one, two, three more times before his core tightened and her cries were lost in his. The hair that had become plastered to her face during the act was brushed gently aside and he kissed along her jawline, across her cheekbone and down her nose to land on her lips. She kissed him back weakly and he let out a satisfied little laugh.

When they had cleaned themselves up, he kissed her again, led her gently from the shower and ran a towel through her hair as she ran a hand up his side, tracing scars both old and new. Then, whatever convincing she had attempted before he had fucked the last of her energy away seemed to have succeeded as he took her into his arms and carried her towards the bedroom to lay her down on fresh sheets.

“Wasn’t quite the sequence of events I had in mind,” she said, yawning despite herself.

He shrugged and laid himself down next to her.

“I apologise for nothing.”

He looked at her like it was the last night he would – the same way he looked at her every night.

“You should get some sleep,” he told her. “You’ve got a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”

She knew, but she didn’t want to think about that too much yet.

“Not tired,” she claimed, though she was betrayed by another yawn that stretched her words.

He raised an eyebrow and she sighed in an overly-dramatic fashion before pushing herself upright and rubbing her eyes with balled fists.

Truth was, she was afraid of what sleep might hold. The nightmares had been getting worse this past week and she was so done with it all. It wasn’t even fear any more, just sheer exhaustion and trepidation.

What did one usually do when faced with the anniversary of a friend’s death? Pay your respects graveside? Visit the places they used to frequent? She could do none of those things – their bodies were incinerated in the blast that consumed all evidence of Umbrella’s part in their end, their favourite haunts meeting a similar fate a couple months later. All that remained for the survivors were their memories and each other.

“You know you can come with us, right?” she said. Carlos shook his head and reached across to rub a thumb along her cheekbone.

“Not a chance,” he said. “This is something you guys have to do together. It’s okay though – Claire’s flight gets in just after you leave. She wants to go to Navy Pier so I’m sure that’ll keep us occupied. Then, we’ll watch a movie or something and when you’re all done I’ll come pick you up and me, you and Rebecca can have as quiet or loud a night as you both need.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Barry was already in town, crashing at Chris’s. Their spare room was all set up for Rebecca’s arrival tomorrow morning, with Claire not that far behind. They had plans to spend time together as a six – seven perhaps if Leon was able to make it after all – but tomorrow was about the S.T.A.R.S. team, about those they had lost and those that remained. They had a table booked at some barbecue place, and a few tentative plans to follow but all they knew was that they needed to be with each other, the how, where and what were irrelevant.

Beneath the impending excitement at seeing Barry and Rebecca again, Jill felt admittedly raw. She had made peace with a lot of things in the last year, but losing her friends had never truly stopped hurting. With time, perhaps it stung a little less, but it never made more sense, never became anything less than a completely irrational event.

In October the newspapers would remember the destruction of Raccoon City. They would remember the thousands of lives lost and the devastation wrought on that small corner of Ohio, but they would not remember that night two months earlier, the one that had started it all. They would not commemorate those lives lost. It was a personal grief, and she was never all too good with that.

She dried her hair, climbed into her pyjamas and took a moment for one last look out of the bedroom window, across the neighbourhood. Their apartment was a shitty little dwelling in an okay area of Chicago, big enough just for the two of them but that’s all they really needed. It was a home for them, their first home, and maybe the heating didn’t always work, the water ran cold when you wanted it hot, and the radiators clanked a little too loudly sometimes, but it represented something she had been chasing ever since that helicopter ride out of RC.

So when she settled down to sleep, nursing a familiar grief, and she felt Carlos’s large arms wrap gently around her, it wasn’t hurt or self-pity she felt. It was happiness. Because after so long searching, she had finally found a place that felt like home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaand, that’s a wrap! Not an exciting chapter by any stretch, but a couple things I wanted to add and a final rounding off :). Thank you so much to each and every one of you for sticking with me this far. When I started writing again I honestly only planned one story, and now I’ve finished the second and still want more – your enthusiasm is honestly what keeps me going so thank you for helping me create way more than I ever expected myself to be capable of.
> 
> I promised info on my next story, so here goes. It’s (tentatively) called The Watcher, it is not set in the same series as this one but is still canon compliant. It is set in late 2002-early 2003 just prior to the assault on the Caucasus facility and Umbrella’s eventual end, three and a bit years after Carlos and Jill separate following the destruction of Raccoon City. It follows Jill and Chris as they are sent to aid the South American branch of their private anti-biohazard agency and Jill finds herself reunited with and working alongside Carlos to take down a bioweapon arms dealer. It will be a mix of action, horror & romance, with lots of Carlos x Jill, and there will be other returning characters from the series, some of whom may be a little unexpected! I’m very excited to write it so definitely stop by and check it out if it’s your thing :)


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